Sed and Bash; unterminated 's' command

So, the following command works from the command prompt:


sed -ne "s|^foobar[[:blank:]]|foo bar|p;p" processed_file

Basically, replace foobar followed by a whitespace with foo bar

Now, i'm trying to execute the same command in a bash script:

#!/bin/bash

sedrules="s|^foobar[[:blank:]]|foo bar|p;p"
file=processed_file

sed -ne $sedrules $file

#done

which errors out with: sed -e expression #1, char 27: unterminated `s'
command

I've googled and found out it has to do with bash and the quotes. Doing
the same command at the command prompt, but without placing quotes
around the expression, gives me the same error. But
sedrules="'s/foobar//p'" doesn't work either. It gives me a sed error of
unknown command

Anybody come across this before and have any suggestions? Google pointed
me in the right direction, but with no solutions.