What are the cipher padding strings in java

Question

Everyone talks about the padding schemes in ciphers but what are the actual strings one needs to pass in to the cipher? I don\'t care if they are symmetric or asymmetric, I

Answer 1

Block cyphers need padding, stream cyphers don't. Block cyphers need padding because they encrypt whole blocks, and your message may not exactly match a whole number of blocks. Padding is used to extend the message length to the next block boundary.

See the Wikipedia article on Cryptographic padding for a lot of detail.

For most purposes PKCS#7 (aka PKCS#5) padding is used: n bytes, all of value n:

01
02 02
03 03 03
...
10 10 10 10 ... 10 10