4.5.3 Making Each Character a Separate Field

There are times when you may want to examine each character of a record separately. This can be done in gawk by simply assigning the null string ("") to FS. (c.e.) In this case, each individual character in the record becomes a separate field. For example:

$ echo a b | gawk 'BEGIN { FS = "" }
>                  {
>                      for (i = 1; i <= NF; i = i + 1)
>                          print "Field", i, "is", $i
>                  }'
-| Field 1 is a
-| Field 2 is
-| Field 3 is b

Traditionally, the behavior of FS equal to "" was not defined. In this case, most versions of Unix awk simply treat the entire record as only having one field. (d.c.) In compatibility mode (see section Command-Line Options), if FS is the null string, then gawk also behaves this way.