Bash: Pass all arguments exactly as they are to a function and prepend a flag on each of them - regex

Question

This seems like a relatively basic question, but I can't find it anywhere after an hour of searching. Many (there are a lot!) of the similar questions do not seem to hit the point.
I am writing a script ("vims") to use vim in a sed-like mode (so I can call normal vim commands on a stream input without actually opening vim), so I need to pass each argument to vim with a "-c" flag prepended to it. There are also many characters that need to be escaped (I need to pass regex expressions), so some of the usual methods on SO do not work.
Basically, when I write:
cat myfile.txt | vims ':%g/foo/exe "norm yyPImyfile: \<esc>\$dF,"' ':3p'
which are two command-line vim arguments to run on stdout,
I need these two single-quoted arguments to be passed exactly the way they are to my function vims(), which then tags each of them with a -c flag, so they are interpreted as commands in vim.
Here's what I've tried so far:
vims() {
vim - -nes -u NONE -c '$1' -c ':q!' | tail -n +2
}
This seems to work perfectly for a single command. No characters get escaped, and the "-c" flag is there.
Then, using the oft-duplicated question-answer, the "$#" trick, I tried:
vims() {
vim - -nes -u NONE $(for arg in "$#"; do echo -n " -c $arg "; done) -c ':q!' | tail -n +2
}
This seems to break the spaces within each string I pass it, so does not work. I also tried a few variations of the printf command, as suggested in other questions, but this has weird interactions with the vim command sequences. I've tried many other different backslash-quote-combinations in a perpetual edit-test loop, but have always found a quirk in my method.
What is the command sequence I am missing?

Answer 1

Add all the arguments to an array one at a time, then pass the entire array to vim with proper quoting to ensure whitespace is correctly preserved.
vims() {
local args=()
while (($# > 0)); do
args+=(-c "$1")
shift
done
vim - -nes -u NONE "${args[#]}" -c ':q!' | tail -n +2
}
As a rule of thumb, if you find yourself trying to escape things, add backslashes, use printf, etc., you are likely going down the wrong path. Careful use of quoting and arrays will cover most scenarios.