I wanted to output a string of all the ascii characters with the following command

 for i in `seq 32 127`; do printf "%c" $i; done

The output of the above command is: 

 33333334444444444555555555566666666667777777777..............

It's the first (from the left) digit of each number.

Looking through this site I came across the answer to my problem http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/15139/how-to-print-all-printable-ascii-chars-in-cli, however I still don't understand why my original snippet does not output the ascii characters as intended.