Never mind, this was indeed a problem I did not really have: I had
prematurely joined an array into a string, and then wanting to split the
string caused my problem. Not joining the array in the first place was the
obvious solution.

On Fri, Sep 28, 2018 at 9:22 AM Jesper Nygårds <jesper.nygards@gmail.com>
wrote:

> This might well be a case of me not understanding my problem, but is there
> a way to use parameter expansion to split only on unquoted spaces?
>
> If I have myvar="my\ string", ${=myvar}  results in "my\" and "var", i.e.
> zsh doesn't care about the fact that the space is quoted.
>
> On the other hand, myvar="my\ var", ${(z)myvar} does respect the quoted
> space and makes no split, but then myvar="my|var", ${(z)myvar} results in
> "my" "|" "var", which is not what I want in this case.
>
> So in short, is there a way to only split on space, but not split on a
> quoted space?
>
>