Add space between every letter

Question

How can I add spaces between every character or symbol within a UTF-8 document? E.g. 123hello! becomes 1 2 3 h e l l o !.

• I have BASH, OpenOffice.org, and gedit, if any of those can do that.
• I don't care if it sometimes leaves extra spaces in places (e.g. 2 or 3 spaces in a single place is no problem).

Answer 1

sed(1) can do this:

$ sed -e 's/\(.\)/\1 /g' < /etc/passwd
r o o t : x : 0 : 0 : r o o t : / r o o t : / b i n / b a s h 
d a e m o n : x : 1 : 1 : d a e m o n : / u s r / s b i n : / b i n / s h 

It works well on e.g. UTF-8 encoded Japanese content:

$ file japanese 
japanese: UTF-8 Unicode text
$ sed -e 's/\(.\)/\1 /g' < japanese 
E X I F 中 の 画 像 回 転 情 報 対 応 に よ り 、 一 部 画 像 （ 特 に 『 
$ 

Answer 2

Shortest sed version

sed 's/./& /g'

Output

$ echo '123hello!' |  sed 's/./& /g'
1 2 3 h e l l o !

Obligatory awk version

awk '$1=$1' FS= OFS=" "

Output

$ echo '123hello!' |  awk '$1=$1' FS= OFS=" "
1 2 3 h e l l o !

Answer 3

Since you have bash, I am will assume that you have access to sed. The following command line will do what you wish.

$ sed -e 's:\(.\):\1 :g' < input.txt > output.txt

Answer 4

sed is ok but this is pure bash

string=hello
for ((i=0; i<${#string}; i++)); do
    string_new+="${string:$i:1} "
done

Answer 5

This might work for you:

echo '1 23h ello  !   ' |  sed 's/\s*/ /g;s/^\s*\(.*\S\)\s*$/\1/;l'
1 2 3 h e l l o !$
1 2 3 h e l l o !

In retrospect a far better solution:

sed 's/\B/ /g' file

Replaces the space between letters with a space.

Answer 6

I like these solutions because they do not have a trailing space like the rest here.

GNU awk:

echo 123hello! | awk NF=NF FS=

GNU awk:

echo 123hello! | awk NF=NF FPAT=.

POSIX awk:

echo 123hello! | awk '{while(a=substr($0,++b,1))printf b-1?FS a:a}'