How do you escape a comma in a user variable?

[Todd Foley]

How do you escape a comma in a user variable?

This breaks the functionality of the build. this example is based off the defined example: https://packer.io/docs/builders/docker.html#run_command

The only difference is this is going through a user variable, which breaks because the parsing has no way to escape the comma that has to be ignored. 

{
  "variables": {
    "changes": "CMD [\"nginx\", \"-g\", \"daemon off;\"]"
  },

  "builders": [
    {
      "type": "docker",
      "image": "ubuntu:16.04",
      "run_command": ["-d", "{{.Image}}"],
      "changes":      "{{ user `changes`}}",
      "commit": true
    }
  ],
  "post-processors": [
    [
      {
        "type": "docker-tag",
        "repository": "my/ubuntu",
        "tag": "16.04"
      }
    ]
  ]
}

[Rickard von Essen]

You can't. 

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[Todd Foley]

Okay, i'll create a single template for each build; sounds like we need to write a tool that generates the template from a script to get around this. Any chance for this to be a feature request the team might take up? 

[Rickard von Essen]

This is hard to fix in a non breaking way and I think it will nut be fixed in the short term. Hopefully by the end of the year Packer uses HCL2 and that will fix this problem.

This is very easily handled with jq.

$ echo '{ "a": "", "b": "X" }' | jq '.a=[ 1, 2, 3 ]'

{

  "a": [

    1,

    2,

    3

  ],

  "b": "X"

}

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