Empty Pattern in my Split function

Hey guys, I brought this up inside another one of my threads but here it is again.
When I leave the <pat> empty ("") it returns an empty table, I'm hoping for it to split each letter up and not nothing…

function split(str,pat)
local t = {}
local fpat = "(.-)" .. pat
local last_end = 1
local s, e, cap = str:find(fpat, 1)
while s do
  if s ~= 1 or cap ~= "" then
  table.insert(t,cap)
  end
last_end = e+1
s, e, cap = str:find(fpat, last_end)
end
if last_end <= #str then
  cap = str:sub(last_end)
  table.insert(t, cap)
  end
return t
end

Use this instead: "."

The period is a special operator for patterns that matches any single character.

I'm confused by what you want. Do you want this function to split the string into separate characters if pat is left empty? If so then there is a handy function called string.gmatch(pat).

local example = "This is a string of characters"
local tExample = {}
for char in example:gmatch(".") do
  table.insert(tExample, char)
end

Now tExample has every character in example seperated.

Alright, lets try that, will edit the post with the results!

Ok well, "." didn't work….
command: textutils.serialize(w.split("lol I Win", "."))
returns: {[1]= "", [2]="", [3]="", [4]="", [5]="", [6]="", [7]="",}

Don't use that split function. This should do the trick:

function stringToCharTable(str)
  local tab = {}
  for i = 1, #str do
    tab[i] = string.sub(str, i, i)
  end
  return tab
end

Thanks I'm sure that works I'll add it, but I still want to know why this isn't working, using 2 different function to split strings is weird, but will have to do!