Iterating over characters in a string in POSIX sh

Question

#!/bin/sh

read -p "Enter sequence:  " seq

for char in $seq; do
    echo "$char"
done

I read sequence of "characters" from standard input. For example let it be 1234(),

I want to change it to be like this:

'1' '2' '3' '4' '(' ')' ','

I don't want to echo this sequence. I need it to has this new value.

Is it possible in standard sh script ?

Answer 1

You can split the string with sed(1):

seq=`printf "%s\n" "$seq" | sed 's/./ &/g'`