my playbook grabs show command output from a cisco switch and then reformats that output into structured data thanks to a parsing script written by someone smarter than me. i’m pretty new to ansible data structures but I believe this data is a list (ios_vlans) of dictionary objects (vlans) which contains multiple elements, including one that is also a list (ports). here is sample data
with_items is a parameter for the task not the module debug, so with_items need to indented at the same level as name and debug.
with_items takes a list, so you need
with_items: "{{ ios_vlans.vlans }}"
ha! well that was silly. beaten by space characters again. thank you so much Kai.