# help with conditional inside of a loop **URL:** \ **Category:** Ansible Project\ **Created:** [June 6, 2013, 11:43pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/help-with-conditional-inside-of-a-loop/12921 "2013-06-06T23:43:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![David\_Birdsong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/bb73d2/32.png) [@David\_Birdsong](https://forum.ansible.com/u/David_Birdsong)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2013, 11:43pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/help-with-conditional-inside-of-a-loop/12921/1 "2013-06-06T23:43:32Z")
Hi, I think this might be an easy one, but I’m unsure of how to use a loop variable inside of the ‘when’ condition. Here’s what I thought would work, but ansible complains of a syntax error: [https://gist.github.com/davidbirdsong/5725778](https://gist.github.com/davidbirdsong/5725778) Perhaps there’s another way to create a filtered list using set\_facts, which I toyed with here, but no amount of debug showed me a list of mount points: [https://gist.github.com/davidbirdsong/5725936](https://gist.github.com/davidbirdsong/5725936) Here’s the relavent output from setup for one of the nodes: [https://gist.github.com/davidbirdsong/5725944](https://gist.github.com/davidbirdsong/5725944) ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/da6949/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan2](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan2)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2013, 11:53pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/help-with-conditional-inside-of-a-loop/12921/2 "2013-06-06T23:53:17Z")
When you start a YAML line with a “{” it thinks it is a dictionary, so you have to quote the line. So like: when: “{{ blarg }}” ---
**Author:** ![David\_Birdsong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/bb73d2/32.png) [@David\_Birdsong](https://forum.ansible.com/u/David_Birdsong)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2013, 12:01am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/help-with-conditional-inside-of-a-loop/12921/3 "2013-06-07T00:01:43Z")
> When you start a YAML line with a “{” it thinks it is a dictionary, so you have to quote the line. > > So like: > > when: “{{ blarg }}” Do you see anything wrong with: when: “{{ item[‘mount’].endswith(‘da3’) }}” I get: fatal: [10.100.1.43] =\> Conditional expression must evaluate to True or False: {% if {{item[‘mount’].endswith(‘da3’)}} %} True {% else %} False {% endif %} ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/da6949/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan2](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan2)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2013, 2:08pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/help-with-conditional-inside-of-a-loop/12921/4 "2013-06-07T14:08:40Z")
Right, you can’t do conditionals on with\_items, the conditional is there to decide whether to evaluate the task at all or not. ---
**Author:** ![David\_Birdsong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/bb73d2/32.png) [@David\_Birdsong](https://forum.ansible.com/u/David_Birdsong)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2013, 12:45am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/help-with-conditional-inside-of-a-loop/12921/5 "2013-06-08T00:45:38Z")
> Right, you can’t do conditionals on with\_items, the conditional is there to decide whether to evaluate the task at all or not. Not to be contrary, but I hacked this into working last night. I think the output shows that the debug module was not executed for loop iterations where the when clause returned false, which is what I was hoping to achieve: [https://gist.github.com/davidbirdsong/5733337](https://gist.github.com/davidbirdsong/5733337) I’d love to know if there’s a better way since this is meant to drive a few steps ie. for each mount point ending in ‘da3’: create and verify directory under the mount point where the dirname is constructed by ip address + some number (unique id) verify a symlink originating from the previous directory to another directory kick off a command to register the directory i just realized in typing that the loop filter actually needs to be a regex ‘^/export/hd{a-z}3$’ not a simple .endswith. do i need to write a module or is there another way to do this natively that i’m not seeing? ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/da6949/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan2](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan2)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2013, 2:42am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/help-with-conditional-inside-of-a-loop/12921/6 "2013-06-08T02:42:20Z")
Hacked this into working means there’s a patch I can look at? I’m open to it, but be sure to deal with the special casing for the package modules where it uses with\_items to produce a single transaction command. ---
**Author:** ![David\_Birdsong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/bb73d2/32.png) [@David\_Birdsong](https://forum.ansible.com/u/David_Birdsong)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2013, 8:40pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/help-with-conditional-inside-of-a-loop/12921/7 "2013-06-10T20:40:35Z")
> Hacked this into working means there’s a patch I can look at? No, sorry wrong use of the word hacked; I ‘fiddled’ with the with\_items + where to satisfy syntax errors and noticed that a simple debug test showed that items that returned False in the ‘where’ clause were skipped.