What is the ideal way to JSON.stringify in Terraform? - json

Question

I'm working on my first Terraform project and I'm looking for the best way to stringify a JSON object. The resource I'm defining has a parameter that expects a JSON string. JSON structure is:
"document": {
"tag": "String Title",
"response": "There's a string response and perhaps a price like $[XX.XX]."
}
}
I don't think jsonencode or jsondecode do this. I could stringify them in advance but that isn't scalable in this case. I wasn't sure if I could do this with JavaScript or another language alongside Terraform, or if there's a function in HCL that will do it.

Answer 1

jsonencode in Terraform is exactly equivalent to JSON.stringify with only one argument in JavaScript.
For example, if you need to assign a string containing a JSON object to an argument called something_json, you could do that like this:
something_json = jsonencode({
document = {
tag = "String Title"
response = "There's a string response and perhaps a price like $[XX.XX]."
}
})
The above would set something_json to a minified version of the following JSON:
{
"document": {
"tag": "String Title",
"response": "There's a string response and perhaps a price like $[XX.XX]."
}
}
Terraform does not have an equivalent of the optional replacer and space arguments in JavaScript's JSON.stringify:
An equivalent of replacer isn't needed in Terraform because all possible values in the Terraform language have a defined JSON equivalent as described in the table in the jsonencode documentation.
space is for generating non-minified JSON; Terraform does not offer any way to do this because it is focused on generating JSON for machine consumption and so prefers to generate the most compact representation possible.