In transaction AL11, files to be displayed, searched, or downloaded are always opened in text mode. You can use the options to define which heuristics are used when opening files to display their contents, when searching files, and when downloading.
You can:
- Accept the options for the session by choosing “Continue”
- Restore the system default values – these default settings are hard-coded into the program
- Save user-specific options or delete them from the database The button for deleting user-specific settings is only visible if user-specific settings exist.
The options are saved user-specifically in table INDX in client 000 (SRTFD = AL11[SY-UNAME], RELID = 11) and are automatically loaded at the start of the program.
Handling Binary Files
The options “Do Not Display the Contents of Binary Files” and “Do Not Search Binary Files” activate the heuristics to identify binary files. This means that a number of lines at the start of the file are read. The system uses the percentage of unprintable characters to determine whether the file is a binary file or a text file. Files identified as binary files are not displayed or taken into account when searching files.
Encoding
You can use the options for encoding to control how files are opened when their content is displayed or they are downloaded
If you choose the option Use Standard Encoding, the files are opened with the OPEN DATASET addition ENCODING DEFAULT. In Unicode systems, this means that the files are opened and displayed as UTF-8 files.
If you choose the option “Detect UTF-8”, you can activate the heuristics to identify UTF-8 files. This can be useful if the standard encoding does not produce the desired results, for example, when displaying files created in a non-Unicode system in a Unicode system. Files identified as UTF-8 files or as 7-bit ASCII files are opened with the addition ENCODING UTF-8 . All other files are opened with the addition ENCODING NON-UNICODE.
The UTF-8 detection is based on the method CL_ABAP_FLIE_UTILITIES=>CHECK_UTF8. You can use “Maximum Quantity to Read [KB]” to specify the maximum number of kilobytes to be checked from the start of the file for the occurrence of non-UTF-8 characters. If you specify the value 0 in this field, the system checks the entire file. In the case of large files, this can take some time. If you have selected the option “File Could Be ASCII: Read Entire File”, the system reads more of the file than specified by “Maximum Quantity to Read [KB]” to find a byte sequence with which it can determine whether the file uses the UTF-8 code page or another code page. In the worst case scenario, the entire file is read. That is, if after reading the amount of data specified by “Maximum Quantity to Read [KB]” from the file, only ASCII files are found, this option would mean in the worst case that the system reads to the end of the file to find the first non-ASCII character.
