Why the output of array using awk is not in right order?

Question

I have a string: Gatto piu bello anche cane in file. I am using awk to split it and to put it into array. But the output is not in the right order. My code is:

Answer 1

Although there is an accepted answer that's not the idiomatic. awk already parses the record to fields and the fields can be accessed with $1 to $NF. You can then iterate over the fields to do whatever you want.

{ for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) 
     do_something_with $i
}

Perhaps you have a more complex requirement but not clear from the description.

Answer 2

awk doesn't actually have indexed arrays; it only has associative arrays. This means you can't iterate over the keys in an guaranteed order. split, however, does promise that the array it populates will use the numbers 1 through n as the keys. This means you can iterate over the correct numerical range, and use those to index the array.

for (i=1; i<=length(text_arr); i++) {
    print text_arr[i];
}