Ansible search and replace without regex only string literals to avoid escaping - string

Question

i like to search and replace string which makes me to escape allot of if i use the regexp search / replace :
in the mystuff.txt (soory about the blah blah but is allot of personal text ) i have allot of string but i like to search and replace those:
Blah Blah ${DBNname.db_name} Blah Blah
Blah Blah ${DBNname.db_name} Blah Blah
Blah Blah ${DBName.ip}
In ansible playbook i have this :
- name: search
replace:
path: "foo/mystuff.txt"
regexp: "{{ item.split('|')[0] }}"
replace: "{{ item.split('|')[1] }}"
with_items: "{{ config_list }}"
And in command line i passing :
config_list =['\\\${DBNname\\\.db_name}|MySql','\\\${DBName\\\.ip}|127.0.0.1']
and this is working fine .
As you can see i have allot of escaping going on i like to avoid it as the paramters can be long.

Answer 1

Are you required to pass in your config_list variable on the command line? Because if you put it in a file instead, the escaping is much simpler. For example, if I place the following content in config_list.yml:
config_list:
- search: '\${DBNname\.db_name}'
replace: 'MySql'
- search: '\${DBNname\.ip}'
replace: '127.0.0.1'
I can run this playbook:
- hosts: localhost
gather_facts: false
tasks:
- replace:
path: mystuff.txt
regexp: '{{ item.search }}'
replace: '{{ item.replace }}'
loop: '{{ config_list }}'
Like this:
ansible-playbook playbook.yml -e #config_list.yml
And it transforms this:
${DBNname.db_name}
${DBNname.ip}
Into:
MySql
127.0.0.1
If you really need to pass parameters on the command line using the format shown in your question, this seems
to work:
$ ansible-playbook playbook.yml -e '{"config_list": ["\\${DBNname\\.db_name}|MySql", "\\${DBNname\\.ip}|127.0.0.1"]}'
If you write the playbook like this:
- hosts: localhost
gather_facts: false
tasks:
- replace:
path: mystuff.txt
regexp: '{{ x.0 }}'
replace: '{{ x.1 }}'
vars:
x: "{{ item.split('|') }}"
loop: '{{ config_list }}'
The above playbook also works with this input:
ansible-playbook playbook.yml -e 'config_list="[\"\\${DBNname\\.db_name}|MySql\", \"\\${DBNname\\.ip}|127.0.0.1\"]"'