What Are Pad Characters

Pad characters are characters used to fill up remaining available character spaces in a field. For example, if a field requires a minimum of 15 characters, a user may type computerhope***, where the asterisk is the pad character. Most programs allow the pad characters to be any character. However, we recommend you use the same pad characters and use non-word characters, because using e as a pad character would make computerhopeeee confusing.

Character, Padding, Software terms