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

Bash works as next - when parsing a script or command line:

1. parsing and lexical analysis
2. expansion
   1. brace expansion
   2. tidle expansion
   3. variable expansion
   4. artithmetic and other substitutions
   5. command substitution
   6. word splitting
   7. filename generation (globbing)
3. removing quotes

as you can see, the word splitting is nearly at the end, so after the e.g. arithmetic exansion but before the filename globbing, Removing the quotes is the last step.