Puzzling discrepancy in bash variables

[RMMM]

I'm trying to create a bash function for use in auto completion, but
I've run into bash behavior I don't understand. All I want to do is
generate a list of the file names from a certain directory. I have a line

filenames=$(for file in `ls -1 mydir`; do echo -n "${file} " ; done )

This seems to produce the correct list:
bash> echo $filenames
resources doc src 
bash> 

However, it doesn't work with the compgen function:
bash> compgen -W "${filenames}" -- s
bash>

????

On the other hand, if I create the same variable manually, it works:
bash> filenames1="resources doc src "
bash> compgen -W "${filenames1}" -- s
src
bash>

As far as I can tell, the variables $filenames and $filenames1 have the same
values. Yet, they 
behave differently when used in an argument. Is there some hidden aspect to
a bash variable 
that I'm not seeing?



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