Reading words from variable in shell script?

[ghost]

I'm trying to use jo in a shell script by appending key value-pairs to a variable, and passing this as an argument to jo, but I'm not getting the expected output:

jo_script.sh:

#!/bin/bash

value0="foo"
value1="bar"
value2="foo bar"

string="'key0=${value0}' 'key1=${value1}' 'key2=${value2}'"

# Contents of string: 'key0=foo' 'key1=bar' 'key2=foo bar'

jo "$string"

Output:

{"'key0":"foo' 'key1=bar' 'key2=foo bar'"}

Expected output:

{"key0":"foo","key1":"bar","key2":"foo bar"}

Any ideas why this is happening?

[gromgit]

In short, jo "$string" stopped word-splitting from happening, because you quoted $string. Removing the double quotes doesn't work either, because your key2 value has a internal space which would also be split.

What you're trying to do (build a list of arguments for a command) is such a common task that there's a bash idiom for it: Use arrays. Specifically:

$ value0="foo"
$ value1="bar"
$ value2="foo bar"

$ arr=("key0=${value0}" "key1=${value1}" "key2=${value2}")

$ jo "${arr[@]}"
{"key0":"foo","key1":"bar","key2":"foo bar"}