LPAD
Pads the beginning of a string up to the specified character length.
Syntax
LPAD (str, len, padding)
Arguments
str: any string or binary object
len: total length of the string
padding: the characters to pad with
Return Type
String
Examples
SELECT LPAD('ohai',10,'_') as o;
****
+------------+
| o |
+------------+
| ohai |
+------------+
SELECT LPAD('123',10,'0') as o;
****
+------------+
| o |
+------------+
| 0000000123 |
+------------+Implicit Collation
When character_set_server is set to utf8, string literals with characters using 4-byte encoding are implicitly assigned binary collation and processed as a sequence of bytes rather than characters. This implicit conversion to binary collation causes string functions to return unexpected results. To avoid using implicit binary collation, either use explicit type casting or use database columns defined with the utf8mb4 character set.
For more information, refer to Implicit Collation in Special Cases.