String Obfuscator

You need to send a log excerpt or a spreadsheet to a vendor and there are real customer emails, phone numbers and ID numbers sitting in the middle of it. Deleting by hand breaks column alignment and one always slips through. The practical move is to replace the middle with asterisks and keep the edges: enough for the person on the other side to confirm it is the same record without reading the value.

The rule is positional, not semantic. You choose how many characters to keep at the start and at the end, and everything between becomes the chosen character, line by line. Punctuation counts: 123.456.789-00 with 3 and 2 comes out as 123, nine asterisks and 00, dots and hyphen masked along with the digits. If a line is shorter than or equal to the two edges combined, the whole line is masked, which prevents exposing a short value by accident. Email mode splits at the last at sign and masks only the local part.

This is display masking, not anonymization. The original length survives, so the output still reveals how many digits the value had, and anyone holding the source data can match the visible edges back to the record. Card numbers deserve extra care: the first six digits identify the issuer, and combined with the last four that is more than a support ticket needs. Text is processed in your browser as you type, with nothing uploaded.