Escaping problem with regular expression and variables

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1

Hello,

I’m taking my first steps with Ansible (1.4 dev) and love it so far. However I hit a snag escaping special characters with a particular line. I’m trying to insert a line into a YAML file:

  • name: Insert clustername {{ clustername }}
    lineinfile:
    dest=/etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml
    regexp=‘^cluster.name: {{ clustername }}’
    line=‘cluster.name: “{{ clustername }}”’
    state=present

Both the regexp and the line expression give an error, either because of the variable brackets or because of the colon. (clustername is a simple string, no special characters).

I’ve tried a combination of single and double dashes, escaping just the regular expression or the whole argument, but can’t get it to work.

Any ideas?

Thank you,
christian

2

“Both the regexp and the line expression give an error”

Which error?

When reporting a problem on this list, always share the error.

3

Try YAML escaping the arguments with a ‘>’. That is,

lineinfile: >

dest=/etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml
regexp=‘[1](http://cluster.name): {{ clustername }}’
line=‘cluster.name: “{{ clustername }}”’
state=present

  1. cluster.name ↩︎

4

To be clear, that’s not escaping, that’s a line continuation.

5

Not quite - it does escape as well. That’s why the ': ’ sequence is not triggered.

K

6

More so that it knows you aren’t going to specifying another hash value.

See section 2.3 here:

http://www.yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html

7

True. I think said escaping when I meant quoting. Would be better to say it forces the following block to be interpreted as a scalar.

I’ve taken to always using the ‘>’ quoting mechanism even when not needed, because it avoids the whole confusing ‘colon’ + ‘space’ issue.

Enough said.

K