Bash word splitting mechanism

Question

I am new to Bash and I am seeing that there is automatic word splitting done by Bash:

a=\"1  2     3 4\"

If I echo \"a\" by echo $a

Answer 1

Read man bash. For assignment, it says

All values undergo tilde expansion, parameter and variable expansion, command substitution, arithmetic expansion, and quote removal [ ... ] Word splitting is not performed, with the exception of "$@" as explained below under Special Parameters. Pathname expansion is not performed.

Word splitting also does not happen in [[ ]] conditions:

Word splitting and pathname expansion are not performed on the words between the [[ and ]]