Are strings in AWK treated as arrays? [duplicate] - awk

Question

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loop over characters in input string using awk
(4 answers)
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I'm pretty new to awk/gawk and I found this a little confusing. I hope you may help me shed some light on this question: Are strings in awk treated as array of chars?
I've read something about the stringy-ness of this computing language, so I tried to make a script like this:
BEGIN {
myArray[1] = "foo"
myArray[2] = "bar"
myArray[3] = 42
awkward()
}
function awkward() {
for (j in myArray) {
for (d in myArray[j]) {
# error!
}
}
}
Was I naive in thinking something like this could work? It actually does not work with my version of gawk, giving me this error:
for (d in myArray[j]) {
^ syntax error
Can anybody help me to understand more about why this should not work? Bonus: can anybody share their workaround on this?
To clarify a bit, I'm trying to access the content of myArray[j] char by char, using a for loop on index d.

Answer 1

No, strings in awk are not treated as array of chars. Use substr():
$ cat foo.awk
BEGIN {
myArray[1] = "foo"
myArray[2] = "bar"
myArray[3] = 42
awkward()
}
function awkward() {
for (j in myArray) {
for (i=1;i<=length(myArray[j]);i++) { # here
print substr(myArray[j],i,1) # and here
}
}
}
Run it:
$ awk -f foo.awk
f
o
o
b
a
r
4
2