Passing a string with spaces as a function argument in bash

you should put quotes and also, your function declaration is wrong.

myFunction()
{
    echo "$1"
    echo "$2"
    echo "$3"
}

And like the others, it works for me as well. Tell us what version of shell you are using.

Another solution to the issue above is to set each string to a variable, call the function with variables denoted by a literal dollar sign \$. Then in the function use eval to read the variable and output as expected.

#!/usr/bin/ksh

myFunction()
{
  eval string1="$1"
  eval string2="$2"
  eval string3="$3"

  echo "string1 = ${string1}"
  echo "string2 = ${string2}"
  echo "string3 = ${string3}"
}

var1="firstString"
var2="second string with spaces"
var3="thirdString"

myFunction "\${var1}" "\${var2}" "\${var3}"

exit 0

Output is then:

    string1 = firstString
    string2 = second string with spaces
    string3 = thirdString

In trying to solve a similar problem to this, I was running into the issue of UNIX thinking my variables were space delimeted. I was trying to pass a pipe delimited string to a function using awk to set a series of variables later used to create a report. I initially tried the solution posted by ghostdog74 but could not get it to work as not all of my parameters were being passed in quotes. After adding double-quotes to each parameter it then began to function as expected.

Below is the before state of my code and fully functioning after state.

Before - Non Functioning Code

#!/usr/bin/ksh

#*******************************************************************************
# Setup Function To Extract Each Field For The Error Report
#*******************************************************************************
getField(){
  detailedString="$1"
  fieldNumber=$2

  # Retrieves Column ${fieldNumber} From The Pipe Delimited ${detailedString} 
  #   And Strips Leading And Trailing Spaces
  echo ${detailedString} | awk -F '|' -v VAR=${fieldNumber} '{ print $VAR }' | sed 's/^[ \t]*//;s/[ \t]*$//'
}

while read LINE
do
  var1="$LINE"

  # Below Does Not Work Since There Are Not Quotes Around The 3
  iputId=$(getField "${var1}" 3)
done<${someFile}

exit 0

After - Functioning Code

#!/usr/bin/ksh

#*******************************************************************************
# Setup Function To Extract Each Field For The Report
#*******************************************************************************
getField(){
  detailedString="$1"
  fieldNumber=$2

  # Retrieves Column ${fieldNumber} From The Pipe Delimited ${detailedString} 
  #   And Strips Leading And Trailing Spaces
  echo ${detailedString} | awk -F '|' -v VAR=${fieldNumber} '{ print $VAR }' | sed 's/^[ \t]*//;s/[ \t]*$//'
}

while read LINE
do
  var1="$LINE"

  # Below Now Works As There Are Quotes Around The 3
  iputId=$(getField "${var1}" "3")
done<${someFile}

exit 0

I'm 9 years late but a more dynamic way would be

function myFunction {
   for i in "$*"; do echo "$i"; done;
}