title: Bash: Split string into character array
body: <p>I have a string in a Bash shell script that I want to split into an array of characters, not based on a delimiter but just one character per array index. How can I do this? <strike>Ideally it would not use any external programs.</strike> Let me rephrase that. My goal is portability, so things like <code>sed</code> that are likely to be on any POSIX compatible system are fine.</p>