YAML and colons -- cannot escape / quote -- need help

[johhue]

Hello ...

I am invoking puppet agent -t from Ansible, and since some puppet non-zero return codes are OK, I am parsing the stdout to look for errors and fail if any errors are seen.

In this case, the error string I am looking for is "has failures: true"

The string I am looking for has a colon and I cannot for the life of me escape it. 

I have tried single quotes, double quotes, quotes around the whole thing, quotes only around the colon, backslash.

Also, I am not using the puppet module because I cannot become root on the other side, I only have sudo privs to the command ... Suggesting I use the puppet modules is not an option for us, unfortunately.

Any suggestions on how to escape this colon? Is this an issue with the find function? I feel the answer will be something really obvious.

If I remove the "and puppet_execute.stdout.find("has failures: true") > -1" or remove the colon, the play runs just fine. It is this darn colon!!!

Here is the execute.yml from the role "puppet_apply"

- name: "Executing puppet apply"

  become: no

  changed_when: false

  ignore_errors: yes

  shell: cd /var/tmp && sudo /usr/local/bin/puppet agent -t --no-noop  | grep -v 'Loading facts in ' | sed -r 's/\x1B\[([0-9]{1,2}(;[0-9]{1,2})?)?[m|K]//g'

  args:

     executable: /bin/bash

  register: puppet_execute

  when: puppet_prompt == "GO"

- name: Verify if puppet was already running

  fail: msg="PUPPET ALREADY RUNNING -- ABORT"

  when: puppet_prompt == "GO" and puppet_execute.stdout.find("Run of Puppet configuration client already in progress") > -1

- name: Verify if any errors detected

  fail: msg="PUPPET ISSUES"

  when: puppet_prompt == "GO" and puppet_execute.stdout.find("has failures: true") > -1

2016-09-22 11:13:09,179 p=26334 u=sysint |  fatal: [hostA]: FAILED! => {"failed": true, "reason": "Syntax Error while loading YAML.\n\n\nThe error appears to have been in '/app/sysint/ansible/roles/puppet_apply/tasks/execute.yml': line 19, column 76, but may\nbe elsewhere in the file depending on the exact syntax problem.\n\nThe offending line appears to be:\n\n  fail: msg=\"PUPPET ERRORS DETECTED\"\n  when: puppet_prompt == \"GO\" and puppet_execute.stdout.find(\"'has failures: true'\") > -1\n                                                                           ^ here\nWe could be wrong, but this one looks like it might be an issue with\nunbalanced quotes.  If starting a value with a quote, make sure the\nline ends with the same set of quotes.  For instance this arbitrary\nexample:\n\n    foo: \"bad\" \"wolf\"\n\nCould be written as:\n\n    foo: '\"bad\" \"wolf\"'\n"}

[Kai Stian Olstad]

On 22. sep. 2016 20:29, johhue wrote:
<snip>

> In this case, the error string I am looking for is "has failures: true"
>
> The string I am looking for has a colon and I cannot for the life of me
> escape it.
>
> I have tried single quotes, double quotes, quotes around the whole thing,
> quotes only around the colon, backslash.

Quotes around the whole when expression should work.

<snip>

> - name: Verify if any errors detected
> fail: msg="PUPPET ISSUES"
> when: puppet_prompt == "GO" and puppet_execute.stdout.find("has failures: true") > -1

Have you tied this?

when: 'puppet_prompt == "GO" and puppet_execute.stdout.find("has

failures: true") > -1'


--
Kai Stian Olstad