Brace expansion from a variable in Bash

Question

I would like to expand a variable in Bash. Here\'s my example:

variable=\"{1,2,3}\"
echo $variable

Expected output:

1 2 3
         


        

Answer 1

This won't work first because double-quotes suppress brace expansion:

variable="{1,2,3}"

This still won't work because bash will not assign a list to a variable:

variable={1,2,3}

The solution is to assign your list to an array:

$ variable=( {1,2,3} )
$ echo "${variable[@]}"
1 2 3