Issue escaping curly braces in template file

[matthew Higgs]

Hey.  I am having a bit of trouble trying to convert a jinja template because of the some issues escaping curly braces.  Consider this simple jinja template that is currently returning an error:

activationID: {{{ lookup('ansible.builtin.env', 'QUALYS_ACTIVATIONID') }}}
CustomerID: {{{ lookup('ansible.builtin.env', 'QUALYS_CUSTOMERID') }}}

As you can see, there is an environment variable storing a string value that I need, but the final string that my playbook needs is that value surrounded by single curly brackets, eg:

{34-34-456-34}

I have tried various methods I found online to attempt to get ansible to properly convert the jinja template, including:

Example 1:

activationID: \{{{ lookup('ansible.builtin.env', 'QUALYS_ACTIVATIONID') }}\}
CustomerID: \{{{ lookup('ansible.builtin.env', 'QUALYS_CUSTOMERID') }}\}

Example 2:

activationID: "{{{ lookup('ansible.builtin.env', 'QUALYS_ACTIVATIONID') }}}"
CustomerID: "{{{ lookup('ansible.builtin.env', 'QUALYS_CUSTOMERID') }}}"

Example 3:

activationID: "\{{{ lookup('ansible.builtin.env', 'QUALYS_ACTIVATIONID') }}\}"
CustomerID: "\{{{ lookup('ansible.builtin.env', 'QUALYS_CUSTOMERID') }}\}"

But no matter what I try, I keep getting this error:

The error was: . expected token ':', got '}

I did notice some interesting output from ansible regarding how the template is being parsed as I ran the examples listed above.  For example, the output when I ran example 1:

String: activationID: \\{{{ lookup('ansible.builtin.env', 'QUALYS_ACTIVATIONID') }}\\}\nCustomerID: \\{{{ lookup('ansible.builtin.env', 'QUALYS_CUSTOMERID') }}\\}\n. expected token ':', got '}'"

As you can see, "\" which I want to escape the outer most curly brace is itself being automatically escaped by ansible.   Same when I run example 3:

"msg": "AnsibleError: template error while templating string: expected token ':', got '}'. String: activationID: \"\\{{{ lookup('ansible.builtin.env', 'QUALYS_ACTIVATIONID') }}\\}\"\nCustomerID: \"\\{{{ lookup('ansible.builtin.env', 'QUALYS_CUSTOMERID') }}\\}\"\n. expected token ':', got '}'"

I am at a loss as to what to do here.  Any help would be awesome.

[Todd Lewis]

Maybe try these expressions:

{{ '{' ~ lookup('ansible.builtin.env', 'QUALYS_ACTIVATIONID') ~ '}' }}
{{ '{' ~ lookup('ansible.builtin.env', 'QUALYS_CUSTOMERID') ~ '}' }}

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Todd

[Dick Visser]

If you need this a lot then you could even dedicate a filter to it.

For example, create a directory called 'filter_plugins' adjacent to your playbook and then create a file called 'filters.py' that contains:

def embrace(string):
    return '{' + string + '}'
class FilterModule(object):
    def filters(self):
        return {
            'embrace': embrace
        }

Now you can do:

activationID: "{{ lookup('ansible.builtin.env', 'QUALYS_ACTIVATIONID') | embrace }}"
CustomerID: "{{ lookup('ansible.builtin.env', 'QUALYS_CUSTOMERID') | embrace }}"

Dick

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