[Help-bash] Word splitting

[Paul Wagner]

Hello Bashonados,

apologies in case this question has been answered before, or if the 
answer is all too obvious, I haven't been able to google a satisfying 
solution.

Sometimes I would want bash to 'honor' quotes inside parameter 
expansions, i.e. treat quotes inside an expansion not as literal, but as 
syntactical, in order to prevent word splitting inside pairs of those 
quotes.

Example:

$ s='aaa "bbb ccc" ddd'
$ for p in xxx $s zzz; do echo $p; done

obviously gives

xxx
aaa
"bbb
ccc"
ddd
zzz

How can I instruct bash to give

xxx
aaa
bbb ccc
ddd
zzz

My practical solution would be arrays, but that feels not very elegant, 
and I found a rather theoretical one (as it only works in my minimal 
example) to be

$ eval "for p in xxx $s zzz; do echo \$p; done"

Is there any smart, more general way to do this?

Thanks for your help,

Paul