Question

I am doing a bash script and I want to display the characters of a variable ($VAR). What I want the script to do is (pseudo-code) :

String var = "Hello";
for (int i = 0; i < var.length(); i++) {
    System.out.println(var.substring(i, i+1));
}

The size of the variable can change, one time it can be 5 characters and the next time 6 for example.
Thank you for you help!
Michaël

Answer 1

Here’s a, hopefully quite close, translation.

var="Hello"
for (( i = 0; i < ${#var}; i++ ))
do
    echo ${var:i:1}
done

Illustrates a few bash concepts.

• ${#var} gives the number of characters in variable ${var}
• ${var:x:y} gives a substring of characters of ${var} starting at position x, length y