register output from shell command, match line to supplied value and return value of different column

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1

merely looking for some suggestions how to perform the following actions in ansible

  1. run a shell command (ok this one is easy), it will return a list of values in the format of:

A B C D
D E F G

  1. now i want to match a line with a value and return the value of a DIFFERENT column… so using the above, i want to match F but return the value of column 1 (in the example this would be “D”) as a variable that i can use further in the playbook.
    (matching the search value is easy to get a true or false however i am perplexed how to do this the ansible way)

In pure linux i could hack this with a grep of “F” and awk out the column i want, but trying to not do everything with the shell module if i dont need to.

Any suggestions welcome.

Thanks

2

Parsing string/text in Ansible is not trivial as you would need a lot more code to do it.
Since you already running shell piping it through awk '{if ($3 == "F") print $1}' is a lot easier.