How can I split a string into an array of individual characters?

Remember that you can iterate over strings in several ways. Most often, people use the gmatch iterator because it can identify certain string patterns within a string and return only what is consistent with a given pattern. For example, the programmer can say "give me only the numbers within this string" and the gmatch iterator will do so. The pattern to describe this would be %d+.

In your case, you're not interested in a specific pattern. You just want all the individual characters. You can still achieve this with using gmatch because there is a special character that matches any character. It is simply just a dot (.)

Example:

local str = "Hello World"

-- array of characters in 'str'
local chars = {}

-- using gmatch as the iterator of the for loop, match every character using the '.' symbol as the pattern.
for c in string.gmatch(str, ".") do
    chars[#chars+1] = c
end

And so, chars would now refer to the array {"H", "e"," l", "l", "o", " ", "W", "o", "r", "l", "d"} I hope this helps and answers your question. If you have any further questions, just let me know.