[erlang-questions] question regarding symmetric encryption with crypto library

[Larry White]

In the past the encryption libraries I've used have accepted an arbitrary
string as plain text input.  The des implementation in crypto (and the
algorithm itself) seems to require that the the input text be some multiple
of 8 bytes long.  I can pad the input string with something to make it n*8
bytes long, but then when I decrypt the string, I have no way of knowing if
the returned value was padded and by how much.

This seems like a problem many people must have solved.  What's the right
way to do this here?

thanks much for your help.
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