Thank you for such a fast response,
Looking at the potential items we plan on using, using the longest word length would possibly be a problem. The longest string we may need to display is 30 words long and the largest word allowed would be 12 characters. Testing the code you just posted, 30 blanks at 12 characters each causes the blanks to wrap across the display. I assume there is a way to clean it up but since I will not have control over the size of the screen participants use to complete the task I think it would be best to limit the amount of characters masked.
If it is too much effort to have the masks be a uniform size despite how large the actual word is that the original way (underscores match character length) is probably fine.
Thanks again for the quick reply.