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array with newlines preserved as literal text



I create some nasty output involving a grep search, save to to a variable, send it to a function which ends up calling 'eval' which receives the input and executes it like this:

    @ eval "$@"
    echo "\nYou (hard return)
    will\\nregret'\x0a'\nthe day you '\n' were born."

... I can save the output to a file perfectly:
    $ eval "$@" >! junk

    $ cat junk
    echo "\nYou (hard return)
    will\\nregret'\x0a'\nthe day you '\n' were born."   # Perfectly identical.

... and I can recapture that text from the file to a variable like this:

    $ typeset -a array1=( "${(q+)$(<junk)}" )

    $ print -l $array1
    $'    echo "\nYou (hard return)
    will\\nregret'\x0a'\nthe day you '\n' were born."'

... pretty good.  And there's probably a way of stripping off the outer: $'...'.
But if I try to capture the output to a variable directly:

    $ array2=$(eval "$@")

... the results are spectacularly  bad no matter how I dress it up with ' ${(f)....}' or quotes  any other invocation I can think of. But surely  there's a way.   I understand newlines are hard to ignore.  Various ideas would treat the text: ' \n ' as text alright but also ignore the 'real' newline that is invisible in an editor but must of course be there in the real string so everything would end up on one line.  Instead of using '(q+)' I tried '(F)' and stripped out the newlines like this: 'array2=${array2//'\n'/-NL-}' and it sorta works but it's vulgar.  The ' \x0a' is forgivable. Note that the input of all this is grep searches in code, so the lines found are bound to contain all sorts of rotten stuff, but I want literal output.
How do I pull this off?  There will be a way.





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