Why is Ansible unable to read unicode string as JSON? - json

Question

Summary
When retrieving data using the uri module in Ansible, I am unable to parse a section of it as JSON to retrieve a nested value.
The desired value is the ci field inside the content.data or json.data field (see output below).
Steps to Reproduce
site.yml
---
- hosts: localhost
gather_facts: false
tasks:
- name: Get String
uri:
url: "http://localhost/get-data"
method: POST
body_format: json
body: "{ \"kong-jid\": \"run-sn-discovery\" }"
return_content: yes
register: output
- set_fact:
ci: "{{ output.json.data.ci }}"
- debug:
msg: "{{ ci }}"
The {{ output }} variable
{
u'status': 200,
u'cookies': {},
u'url': u'http://kong-demo:8000/get-data',
u'transfer_encoding': u'chunked',
u'changed': False,
u'connection': u'close',
u'server': u'kong/0.34-1-enterprise-edition',
u'content':
u'{"data":"\\"{u\'ci\': u\'3bb8d625dbac3700e4f07b6e0f96195b\'}\\""}',
'failed': False,
u'json': {u'data': u'"{u\'ci\': u\'3bb8d625dbac3700e4f07b6e0f96195b\'}"'},
u'content_type': u'application/json',
u'date': u'Thu, 18 Apr 2019 15:50:25 GMT',
u'redirected': False,
u'msg': u'OK (unknown bytes)'
}
Result
[user#localhost]$ ansible-playbook site.yml
[WARNING]: Could not match supplied host pattern, ignoring: all
[WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available
PLAY [localhost] ***************************************************************************************************************
TASK [Pass Redis data to next task as output] **********************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]
TASK [set_fact] ****************************************************************************************************************
fatal: [localhost]: FAILED! => {}
MSG:
The task includes an option with an undefined variable. The error was: 'ansible.utils.unsafe_proxy.AnsibleUnsafeText object' has no attribute 'ci'
The error appears to have been in 'site.yml': line 19, column 7, but may
be elsewhere in the file depending on the exact syntax problem.
The offending line appears to be:
- set_fact:
^ here
exception type: <class 'ansible.errors.AnsibleUndefinedVariable'>
exception: 'ansible.utils.unsafe_proxy.AnsibleUnsafeText object' has no attribute 'ci'
Important Troubleshooting Information
It appears the root issue is related to which Ansible type being interpreted. I desire to parse ci from the output in one task.
The two-task solution shown below works, but this leads me to believe this should be possible in one line...
Two-Task Solution
- set_fact:
ci: "{{ output.json.data | from_json }}"
- debug:
msg: "{{ ci['ci'] }}"
But the ci fact set from {{ output.json.data | from_json }} reports a different TYPE than the inline type...
Unicode or Dict?
- debug:
msg: "{{ output.json.data | from_json | type_debug }}" # returns unicode
- set_fact:
ci: "{{ output.json.data | from_json }}"
- debug:
msg: "{{ ci | type_debug }}" # returns dict
Why isn't {{ output.json.data | from_json | type_debug }}
the same as {{ ci | type_debug }}?

Answer 1

Although json and data are keys in their resp objects, ci is just part of a larger string (which happens to look like a JSON object
If the relevant line in your datastructure would be:
u'json': {u'data': {'ci': u'3bb8d625dbac3700e4f07b6e0f96195b'}},
then you could expect to use "{{ output.json.data.ci }}" but not when the .ci part is just a normal part of a string.