How to pass array to bash shell script?

The AR array is passed via the first argument to second.sh.

first.sh

#!/bin/bash
AR=('foo' 'bar' 'a space' 'bat')
printf "AR array contains %d elements: " ${#AR[@]}
printf "%s " "${AR[@]}"
printf "\n"
./second.sh "$AR"
./second.sh "$(printf "(" ; printf "'%s' " "${AR[@]}" ; printf ")")"

Note that sh is not used anymore to run the second.sh script.

These chained printf are used to forge a single parameter that will be safe if some array elements contain space chars.

second.sh

#!/bin/bash
declare -a ARR=$1
printf "ARR array contains %d elements: " ${#ARR[@]}
printf "%s " "${ARR[@]}"
printf "\n"

----

For a solution where the AR array is passed using any number of arguments to the second.sh script.

first.sh

#!/bin/bash
AR=('foo' 'bar' 'a space' 'bat')
printf "AR array contains %d elements: " ${#AR[@]}
printf "%s " "${AR[@]}"
printf "\n"
./second.sh "$AR"
./second.sh "${AR[@]}"

second.sh

#!/bin/bash
ARR=( "$@" )
printf "ARR array contains %d elements: " ${#ARR[@]}
printf "%s " "${ARR[@]}"
printf "\n"

----

The test:

$ chmod +x *sh
$ ./first.sh
AR array contains 4 elements: foo bar a space bat
ARR array contains 1 elements: foo
ARR array contains 4 elements: foo bar a space bat

first

#!/bin/bash
ar=('foo' 'bar' 'baz' 'bat')
./second "${ar[@]}"

second

#!/bin/bash
read -a arr1 <<< "${BASH_ARGV[@]}"
echo "${arr1[@]}"

This should have been enough, but the array order is reversed so I added:

for (( i=${#arr1[@]}-1,j=0 ; i>=0 ; i--,j++ ))
do
    arr2[j]="${arr1[i]}"
done
echo "${arr2[@]}"

read -a reads input into array arr1, but for some reason I can't figure out, the array is reversed, so I reverse it back into arr2.