Sebastian Mendel a écrit : full_str_pad() comes from a comment in the PHP manual for str_pad(). I realize that on php.net' manual, the comment is no longer intact but see here the original comment: "In a lot of cases you're better off using str_repeat if you want to use something like   - it repeats the entire string." http://terra.di.fct.unl.pt/docs/php/function.str-pad.php.htm ------ So it look like there were (are ?) limits to what we can feed to str_pad() as the pad string. In our case, however, we are using a null "\0" as the padding character; I tested it and it works in PHP 5.2.2 but I can't test right now with PHP 4. There is still a problem when you use str_pad() to pad with a string like   echo str_pad('abc',100," ",1); the result ends with the "&" character.