Ansible lineinfile not working as expected (newbie question)

[Boyd J]

I'm learning Ansible for a new project, and I'm stuck on what looks like a basic issue. 

Using lineinfile with backrefs and \1 doesn't work for me.

Simplified playbook to comment out a line starting with "This":

---
- hosts: localhost
  tasks:
  - name: comment out This
    lineinfile: dest=test.txt backrefs=yes regexp='^This.*' line='#\\1'

test.txt file:

Nothing special
This is a test
Nothing special

Result of: "ansible-playbook edit5.yml"

Nothing special
#\
Nothing special

I've tried single, double, 4 \'s.  Single \ gives an error "invalid group reference".  3 gives "#\1", 4 gives "#\" again.

I've been googling for an answer, but all the excerpts I see give similar results.  Other characters other than # work the same.

I am running Ansible 1.9.4 on RHEL 6.7.  I also tried replace: with similar results.

Thank you!

Boyd

[Matt Martz]

You haven't actually created a group reference.  You have to wrap what you want to reference in () to create a group

So maybe something like:

regexp='^(This.*)' line='#\\1'

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Matt Martz
@sivel
sivel.net

[Boyd J]

Aha, thank you, that worked, at least after I changed \\1 to \1.  Now I understand what group reference and those () I was seeing in examples mean; the \1 and \2 reference those in order.