How to Replace the first x characters of a string with a specific character

[ppr (Peter Preuss)]

@Greggy

Thank you so much @ppr for your help, how about if the first few characters are dynamic? like what if the first row has 16 digits while the second row has only 12 and I want the last four to be shown while the first few characters will be replaced by ‘X’?

as also mentioned, then we make use of the string length from the origin value

strOld = dtExcelValue.Rows(intRowCounter).Item("Settlement Account No.").ToString.Trim
strNew = Strings.Right(strOld ,4).PadLeft(strOld.Length,"X"c)