Laser transmitter transmitts the whole alphabet instead of a single character

A string is in its essence just an array of characters. C style strings have a null character, denoted as '\0' marking the end of the string. So a string is an array, but an array is not a string.

If you're implementing the actual transmission mechanism yourself, then most probably yes. You can iterate the string characters until you reach the null character.

    char myString[] = "Hello there!";
    char c;
    unsigned int n = 0;

    while ((c = myString[n++]) != '\0') {
        // TODO transmit the character in the c variable
    }