Proper escaping quotes and braces

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1

Hi,

I can’t write a syntactically correct playbook. How it would be right to write following command:

  • name: test escaping

command: mycommand subcommand --option=‘{“first-item”: 2}’

Can you give me advice?

2

First, ansible version and error output would be helpful, but taking a
guess try this:

- name: test escaping
  command: "mycommand subcommand --option={'first-item': 2}' "

3

Yep.

When you encounter problems it is always suggested to paste whatever error you had.

I’m guessing this is just the common “if you start a line or end a line with a quote, the whole thing must be quoted” which is one of the two gotchas on http://ansibleworks.com/docs/YAMLSyntax.html

Ansible in version 1.4 or later will share some syntax tips, but in either case the exception should indicate you had a YAML syntax error.

4

I’m sorry for not including debug output, I saw this error so many times that already thought that it’s pretty common. Ansible version is 1.3.3.

The error was:
ERROR: Syntax Error while loading YAML script, playbook.yml
Note: The error may actually appear before this position: line 53, column 77

  • name: test escaping
    command: mycommand subcommand --option="{‘‘first-item’’: 2}"
    ^

This actually shows that I have problems not with quotes and braces, but with colon. It’s one of number of non-working examples. It was solved by embracing colon with single quotes.
And working solution is:

  • name: test escaping
    command: mycommand subcommand --option="{first-item’:'2}"

I removed space after colon, and removed single quotes, but I want solution that includes them, so I’m consider question is still open.

5

This is the "you have a free colon in your output, you must quote the whole line, thing.

So basically what Brian suggested above will take care of it.

6

Well, in that case I have syntactically correct YAML, but because Brian omitted outer single-quotes, it performs a wrong command. Verbose output:

changed: [192.168.1.107] =>
{“changed”: true,
“cmd”: [“mycommand”, “subcommand”, “–option={first-item:”, “2}”],
“delta”: “0:00:00.162754”,
“end”: “2013-11-02 15:08:57.654332”,
“rc”: 0, “start”: “2013-11-02 15:08:57.491578”,
“stderr”: “upload: invalid arguments”,
“stdout”: “mycommand subcommand[OPTIONS]\n --help display help”}

If I insert the outer quotes, the following error will appear:

ERROR: Syntax Error while loading YAML script, playbook.yml
Note: The error may actually appear before this position: line 53, column 73

  • name: test escaping
    command: mycommand subcommand --option=“{‘first-item’: 2}”"

^

Anyway, if I’ve missing something, this “something” is definetely about YAML syntax and not about Ansible and I should ask it somewhere else. Especially that my problem is already solved in other way.

Thanks.

7

Try using YAML “>” quoting mechanism. This causes the block following the “>” to be interpreted as a YAML scalar, and hence, ignores other YAML special characters like "{ " and ": "

  • name: test escaping
    command: >
    mycommand subcommand --option=“{first-item: 2}”
8

When you said you inserted outer quotes, the example you showed did not show any outer quotes at all.

I mean quote the entire value.

Alternatively, see what Kahil wrote.

9

Hi, trying to execute task:

  • name: Create spark-metrics DB
    shell: curl -X POST http://{{ influxdb.host }}:{{ influxdb_client_port }}/db?u=root&p=root -d “{‘name’: ‘spark-metrics’}”

Ansible dislikes “:”

  • name: Create spark-metrics DB
    shell: curl -X POST http://{{ influxdb.host }}:{{ influxdb_client_port }}/db?u=root&p=root -d “{‘name’: ‘spark-metrics’}”
    ^
    We could be wrong, but this one looks like it might be an issue with
    missing quotes. Always quote template expression brackets when they
    start a value. For instance:

with_items:

  • {{ foo }}

Should be written as:

with_items:

  • “{{ foo }}”
10

Hi,
Alternatively you can use the “> notation” :

shell: >
curl -X POST http://{{ influxdb.host }}:{{ influxdb_client_port }}/db?u=root&p=root -d “{‘name’: ‘spark-metrics’}”

Cheers
Ulli

11

Here is working solution

- name: Create spark-metrics DB
  uri:
    url: "http://{{ influxdb.host }}:{{ influxdb_client_port }}/db?u=root&p=root"
    method: POST
    body: "{\"name\": \"spark-metrics\"}"
    status_code: 201