def clean_input(input, total_length):
    """
    Cleans user input by padding out to sequence length (or above)
    and shaving down to sequence length
    """
    length_ratio = (int)(total_length/len(input)) + 1
    for i in range(length_ratio):
        input += input
    
    # shorten the seed to sequence length
    input = input[(len(input) - total_length) : len(input)]
    return input