Reading character by character with bash read

Question

I've been trying to use bash to read a file character by character.

After much trial and error, I have discovered that this works:

exec 4<file.txt 
declare -i n
while read -r ch <&4; 
     n=0
     while [ ! $n -eq ${#ch} ]
           do  echo -n "${ch:$n:1}"
               (( n++ ))
          done
     echo "" 
     done

I.e., I can read it line by line and then loop through each line char by char.

Before doing this, I had tried: exec 4<file.txt && while read -r -n1 ch <&4; do; echo -n "$ch"; done but it would skip all whitespaces in the file.

Could you please explain why? Is there a way to make the second strategy (i.e. reading char by char with bash's read) work?

Answer 1

You need to remove whitespace characters from the $IFS parameter for read to stop skipping leading and trailing ones (with -n1, the whitespace character if any would be both leading and trailing, so skipped):

while IFS= read -rn1 a; do printf %s "$a"; done

But even then bash's read will skip newline characters, which you can work around with:

while IFS= read -rn1 a; do printf %s "${a:-$'\n'}"; done

Note that bash's read can't cope with NUL characters. And ksh93 has the same issues as bash.

With zsh:

while read -ku0 a; do print -rn -- "$a"; done

(zsh can cope with NUL characters)

Answer 2

This is a simple example using cut, a for loop & wc :

bytes=$(wc -c < /etc/passwd)
file=$(</etc/passwd)

for ((i=0; i<bytes; i++)); do
    echo $file | cut -c $i
done

KISS isn't it ?