Is there replacement for the now defunct 'characters' function?

[GuywithCode]

Hello everyone!

A few months ago, I was coding a translation app that uses inputs from a textbox and translates that text into a different language. I have been using this code for quite some time now:

var code = [
"A" : "Example",
]

let message = Text.text

    var encodedMessage = " "
    
    let array = message!.characters.split(separator: " ")
    
    for singleWord in array {
        
        let word = String(singleWord)
        if let encodedWord = code[word] {
            encodedMessage += encodedWord
        }
        else {
            encodedMessage += word
        }
        encodedMessage += " "
        
    }
    
    print(encodedMessage)

All of this worked fine in Swift 4. When I returned to this a few weeks ago and updated to Swift 5, I kept getting an error at this point in the code:

let array = message!.characters.split(separator: " ")

I know that the characters function has been removed and Swift has updated its functions in regards to strings, but I don't know enough about Swift 5 to be able to fix it. Is there a way to work around this issue without having to rewrite the entire code? (Also, apologies for the formatting, I am a bit new to this).

[cukr]

@GuywithCode

All of this worked fine in Swift 4.

It worked, but was full of warnings saying what you should do instead
'characters' is deprecated: Please use String or Substring directly

In swift4 and swift5 String is a Collection of Characters, so there's no need to use the special view to access them. You should be able to delete the .characters everywhere.
let array = message!.split(separator: " ")

[GuywithCode]

I feel so dumb now. It works perfectly now. Thank you for your help!