Reading words from variable in shell script? about jo HOT 1 CLOSED

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"}

from jo.