Can I read a file character by character?

Hello all respected people,
Can i read a file character by character without using sed,awk and perl commands.

Thanks in advance.

Oops, just saw "without awk ...",
so if you have fold

cnt=1; for i in $(fold -b1 inputfile);do
echo "Char # $cnt is $i"
cnt=$((cnt + 1)) 
done

With recent versions of bash:

cnt=1;while IFS= read -n1;do  
 echo "Char # $cnt is $REPLY"
 cnt=$((++cnt)) 
done<inputfile
#! /bin/ksh

typeset -L1 single
while read line
do
    while (( ${#line} > 0 ))
    do
        single="$line"
        # do what you like with $single
        echo $single
        line=${line#$single}
    done
done < input.txt

Read a line and process a character at a time.

while read -n 1 ch; do echo "$ch" ; done < file

Hello All,
I need to read charters position from 55 to 50, 43 to 37, etc like these random but fixed for every line. Please help