removing newlines from messy strings in pandas dataframe cells?

I’ve used multiple ways of splitting and stripping the strings in my pandas dataframe to remove all the ‘n’characters, but for some reason it simply doesn’t want to delete the characters that are attached to other words, even though I split them. I have a pandas dataframe with a column that captures text from web pages using Beautifulsoup. The text has been cleaned a bit already by beautifulsoup, but it failed in removing the newlines attached to other characters. My strings look a bit like this:

Split single string into character array using ONLY bash

I want to split 'hello' into h e l l o in an array using only bash, I could do it in sed with sed 's/./& /g' but I want to know how to split a string into an array in Bash when I do not know what the delimiter would be, or the delimiter is any single character. I don’t think I can use ${i// /} without some creativity because the delimiter is an unknown, and I don’t think that expression accepts regex. I tried using BASH_REMATCH with [[ string =~ ([a-z].).* ]] but it doesn’t work as I expected. What is the proper way to use only bash to accomplish a string.split() type of behavior? The reason is that I am trying to write the rev utility in all bash: