title: loop over characters in input string using awk
body: <p>Believe it or not, I can't find the answer to what I would think would be this very basic question.</p>
  
  <p>In awk, how can I loop over the input string character by character?  Let's say I just wanted to print them out.  Is there an array I can access?  Or do I need to use substr?</p>
  
  <p>Basically, something like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>echo "here is a string" | awk '
  { for(i=0; i&lt;[length of input string]; i++) 
      printf [value at index i in array x]; 
  }'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Frankly, I'm embarrassed.  </p>