Splitting a string to all it's characters

Question

This should have been simple but I can't find a workaround. I want to split a string into its characters. e.g. dog will be sepearted to: d o g

The problem is I can't put an empty character as a delimiter in the SPLIT function. What am I missing?

The following link includes some answers that might indicate how to do this: https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/51648/how-automatically-to-add-spaces-inbetween-each-character-in-a-text-string — underscore_d, Apr 23 '21 at 11:12

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 23 '21 at 11:16

6

Also

=ArrayFormula(mid(A1,sequence(1,len(A1)),1))

answered Apr 23 '21 at 11:16

Tom Sharpe

JPV · Accepted Answer · 2021-04-23T12:18:00.427

3

Something like this ?

=split(regexreplace(A2, "(.)", "$1_"), "_")

or if you'd want an arrayformula to process a column at once

=ArrayFormula(if(len(A2:A), split(regexreplace(A2:A, "(.)", "$1_"), "_"),))

Reference

More info on how this works? Check this link.

edited Apr 23 '21 at 12:18

answered Apr 23 '21 at 11:14

JPV

This is great, thanks. Can you please explain how this works? – Tom Apr 23 '21 at 11:33
1

The regexreplace adds an underscore after every character (that's what the dot means in regular expression). Correcter: it replaces every character with the same character with an added underscore. Then, split is used (with the underscore as delimiter) to create the array of separate characters. – JPV Apr 23 '21 at 12:15
Also added some additional info in the answer. – JPV Apr 23 '21 at 12:18
Thanks, so (.) represents a character, and $1_ represents adding _ to the character? Why $1 and not (.)_ ? This looks more intuitive – Tom Apr 23 '21 at 12:54
1

Regular expressions have a specific syntax. To learn more about that syntax, check this link: https://support.google.com/a/answer/1371415?hl=en – JPV Apr 23 '21 at 13:13

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 23 '21 at 11:14

1

Try the following

=SPLIT(REGEXREPLACE(O13,"(.)","$1"&"-"),"-",1,1)

answered Apr 23 '21 at 11:14

marikamitsos