loop over characters in input string using awk

Question

Believe it or not, I can\'t find the answer to what I would think would be this very basic question.

In awk, how can I loop over the input string character by charac

Answer 1

Not all awk implementations support the above solutions. In that case you could use substr:

echo here is a string | awk '{
  for (i=0; ++i <= length($0);) 
    printf "%s\n", substr($0, i, 1)
  }'

P.S. In some awk implementations length without arguments defaults to $0, i.e. length and length($0) are equivalent.