Question

I need to have a string that has a specified length and replace the excess characters with a letter.

e.g.

My original string is : “JOHNDOESMITH”. The length should be up to 25 characters only.
I need my string to become “XXXXXXXXXXXXXJOHNDOESMITH” (13 X’s and 12 chars from the original string).

Anybody please tell me how to achieve this? Is there a string function for this? I’ve been racking my brains out for quite some time now and I still can’t find a solution.

Answer 1

You could use str_pad() to do it…

echo str_pad($str, 25, 'X', STR_PAD_LEFT);

CodePad.

You could use str_repeat() to do it…

echo str_repeat('X', max(0, 25 - strlen($str))) . $str;

CodePad.

The length should be up to 25 characters only.

You can always run substr($str, 0, 25) to truncate your string to the first 25 characters.