I am having some trouble figuring out how to iterate over space separated words/characters in a shell script. For instance I would like to iterate over a variable containing the characters in the alphabet separated by a space. 

NOTE: The result should be the same even if the alphabet variable contained space separated strings instead of characters, i.e "aa bb cc ..." instead of "a b c .." 

I have tried a lot of the alternatives provided from:
[How to split a line into words separated by one or more spaces in bash?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1975849/how-to-split-a-line-into-words-separated-by-one-or-more-spaces-in-bash)

**Example**:

```
  local alphabet="a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z"
  local index="0"
  for character in $alphabet; do
      index=$((++index))                                      
      echo "$index. $character"
      # Possibility to do some more stuff
  done 

```

**Expected/Desired output**:

```
1. a
2. b
3. c
and so on..

```

**Result**:

```
1. a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

```

**Additional tests(without success)**:

```
  ####################################################################
  local alphabet="a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z"
  local index="0"
  for character in ${alphabet[@]}; do
      index=$((++index))                                      
      echo "$index. $character"
      # Possibility to do some more stuff
  done 

  ####################################################################
  local alphabet="a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z"                                            
  local alphabetArray=( ${alphabet} )                                                                             
  local index="0"                                                                                                 
  for character in "${alphabetArray[@]}"; do                                                                      
      index=$((++index))                                                                                          
      echo "$index. $character"                                                                                   
      # Possibility to do some more stuff                                                                                        
  done 

  ####################################################################
  local alphabet="a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z"                                            
  local alphabetArray=( ${alphabet} )                                                                             
  local index="0"                                                                                                 
  for character in ${alphabetArray}; do                                                                           
      index=$((++index))                                                                                          
      echo "$index. $character"                                                                                   
      # Possibility to do some more stuff                                                                                        
  done

```

Could someone provide a solution on how to solve this(I would prefer a solution that iterates the alphabet variable without explicitly using an index variable, i.e $alphabet[index] )?