@ThrawnCA
It would be greatly appreciated if you could also add a test in the StringUtilitiesTest for strip controls.
There appear to be no tests for this method in that class currently.

Bare minimum would be a simple validation that when null is provided, null is returned. If you're willing and able to provide more case coverage that would certainly be beneficial, but beyond the scope of this change.

Thank you for the contributions to the project.

@ThrawnCA It would be greatly appreciated if you could also add a test in the StringUtilitiesTest for strip controls. There appear to be no tests for this method in that class currently.

Done.

I notice that this project seems unready for Java 17. It fails module access checks. Also, several tests within EncryptedUtilsPropertiesTest fail because Properties.store attempts to call ReferenceEncryptedProperties.entrySet, which is specifically disallowed.

FYI In order to make the Surefire plugin run successfully (apart from EncryptedPropertiesUtilsTest), I updated its configuration locally to:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>${version.surefire}</version>
    <configuration>
        <argLine>
            --add-opens java.base/java.lang=ALL-UNNAMED
            --add-opens java.base/java.util=ALL-UNNAMED
            --add-opens java.base/java.util.regex=ALL-UNNAMED
            --add-opens java.base/java.text=ALL-UNNAMED
            --add-opens java.logging/java.util.logging=ALL-UNNAMED
        </argLine>
    </configuration>
</plugin>