Quoting a set of parameters for program arguments using sed

I have a script which launches another program. That program takes some command line arguments, which in turn can have parameters. Those parameters may include ";", which has a special meaning in the Bash. To quote these, you can use the following sed command:

$ echo "foo --bar=1 --baz=2" | sed -e 's/\(--[^[:space:]]*=\)\([^[:space:]]*\)/\1"\2"/g'
foo --bar="1" --baz="2"