mjhjmtu

I would like to split three letters such as WER into three independent letters.
as follows:

W = array[0]
E = array[1]
R = array[2]

I tried the command

WER | cut -c1 but I could not save the new string W in a variable.

I tried

set var1 = WER | cut -c1 and it didn't work.

In bash:

str=WER

a=( "$str:0:1" "$str:1:1" "$str:2:1" )

or, as a loop over an arbitrarily long string:

str=WER

a=()
for (( i = 0; i < $#str; ++i )); do
 a+=( "$str:i:1" )
done

$parameter:offset:length is a bash substring expansion that will result in the length number of characters of the string $parameter from offset offset.

It's easier with zsh:

string=WER
array=($(s::)string)
printf '<%s>n' $array

(note that array indicies in zsh start at 1 like in most other shells, not 0 like in bash/ksh).

Or with fish (arrays also start at 1):

set string WER
set array (string split '' $string)
printf '<%s>n' $array

(assumes $string doesn't contain newline characters though).

POSIXly (the POSIX shell has one array: $@ (also starts at 1: $1)), so would also work in bash or zsh and your system's standard sh:

string=WER
set --
while [ -n "$string" ]; do
 tmp=$string#?
 set -- "$@" "$string%%"$tmp""
 string=$tmp
done
printf '<%s>n' "$@"

With csh or tcsh which you seem to be using:

set string = WER
set array = "`printf '%sn' $string:q | fold -w1`"
printf '<%s>n' $array:q

Like for fish, it also assumes the string doesn't contain newline characters. Also note that some fold implementations will fold on bytes instead of characters which would mean it wouldn't work properly if the string contained multi-byte characters.