Iterating each character in a string using Python

As Johannes pointed out,

for c in "string":
    #do something with c

You can iterate pretty much anything in python using the for loop construct,

for example, open("file.txt") returns a file object (and opens the file), iterating over it iterates over lines in that file

with open(filename) as f:
    for line in f:
        # do something with line

If that seems like magic, well it kinda is, but the idea behind it is really simple.

There's a simple iterator protocol that can be applied to any kind of object to make the for loop work on it.

Simply implement an iterator that defines a next() method, and implement an __iter__ method on a class to make it iterable. (the __iter__ of course, should return an iterator object, that is, an object that defines next())

See official documentation

If you need access to the index as you iterate through the string, use enumerate():

>>> for i, c in enumerate('test'):
...     print i, c
... 
0 t
1 e
2 s
3 t

Even easier:

for c in "test":
    print c

Just to make a more comprehensive answer, the C way of iterating over a string can apply in Python, if you really wanna force a square peg into a round hole.

i = 0
while i < len(str):
    print str[i]
    i += 1

But then again, why do that when strings are inherently iterable?

for i in str:
    print i

Several answers here use range. xrange is generally better as it returns a generator, rather than a fully-instantiated list. Where memory and or iterables of widely-varying lengths can be an issue, xrange is superior.

You can also do the following:

txt = "Hello World!"
print (*txt, sep='\n')

This does not use loops but internally print statement takes care of it.

* unpacks the string into a list and sends it to the print statement

sep='\n' will ensure that the next char is printed on a new line

The output will be:

H
e
l
l
o
 
W
o
r
l
d
!

If you do need a loop statement, then as others have mentioned, you can use a for loop like this:

for x in txt: print (x)

If you ever run in a situation where you need to get the next char of the word using __next__(), remember to create a string_iterator and iterate over it and not the original string (it does not have the __next__() method)

In this example, when I find a char = [ I keep looking into the next word while I don't find ], so I need to use __next__

here a for loop over the string wouldn't help

myString = "'string' 4 '['RP0', 'LC0']' '[3, 4]' '[3, '4']'"
processedInput = ""
word_iterator = myString.__iter__()
for idx, char in enumerate(word_iterator):
    if char == "'":
        continue

    processedInput+=char

    if char == '[':
        next_char=word_iterator.__next__()
        while(next_char != "]"):
          processedInput+=next_char
          next_char=word_iterator.__next__()
        else:
          processedInput+=next_char