A data processing system is provided that includes format-preserving encryption and decryption engines. A string that contains characters has a specified format. The format defines a legal set of character values for each character position in the string. During encryption operations with the encryption engine, a string is processed to remove extraneous characters and to encode the string using an index. The processed string is encrypted using a format-preserving block cipher. The output of the block cipher is post-processed to produce an encrypted string having the same specified format as the original unencrypted string. During decryption operations, the decryption engine uses the format-preserving block cipher in reverse to transform the encrypted string into a decrypted string having the same format.