How can I split a string into character in Snowflake?

I need to split a string like “abc” into individual records, like “a”, “b”, “c”.

This should be easy in Snowflake: SPLIT(str, delimiter)

But if the delimiter is null, or an empty string I get the full str, and not characters as I expected.

Answer

Update: SQL UDF

create or replace function split_string_to_char(a string)
returns array
as $$
split(regexp_replace(a, '.', ',\0', 2), ',')
$$
;
select split_string_to_char('hello');

---

I found this problem while working on Advent of Code 2020.

Instead of just splitting a string a working solution is to add commas between all the characters, and then split that on the commas:

select split(regexp_replace('abc', '.', ',\0', 2), ',')

If you want to create a table out of it:

select *
from table(split_to_table(regexp_replace('abc', '.', ',\0', 2), ',')) y

As seen on https://github.com/fhoffa/AdventOfCodeSQL/blob/main/2020/6.sql