ansible parse json array reply from api - json

Question

I am trying to parse a json response from an API. The response in a browser looks like:
[{url: "abc.com/xyz"}]
I request it from ansible:
- name: Get url
uri:
url: my-url...
method: GET
force: yes
return_content: yes
#HEADER_Content-Type: "application/json"
register: json_response
I get a reply from ansible that looks like this (with debug):
- name: print reply
debug:
var: json_response
verbosity: 1
which gives:
ok: [server] => {
"json_response": {
... //removed for readability
"content": "({:url \"https://the-file-I-want\"})"
}
So it seems like some parsing happened already (note the colons :).
Accessing the content seem to work (with debug json_response['content']):
ok: [server] => {
"json_response['content']": "({:url \"https://the-file-I-want\"})"
}
But I cannot seems to access the json response url. If I try to take the first element of the array, I get "(" so it seems it is still a string.
- name: print reply2
debug:
var: json_response['content'][0]
verbosity: 1
from_json does not seem to work: fatal: [server]: FAILED! => {"failed": true, "msg": "the field 'args' has an invalid value, which appears to include a variable that is undefined....
How do I parse a json reply like this one?

Answer 1

I created a json file response.json with the following contents:
{
content: ({:url \"https://the-file-I-want\"})
}
Then, in my playbook I loaded the file and to get the url you need, I created a custom jinja filter since Jinja2 does not have any filter for finding sub-string or regexp.
My custom filter named filter.py(you can name it anything) is in a dir called filter_plugins in the same directory as my playbook. My filter.py file is as follows:
import re
class FilterModule(object):
''' Custom filters are loaded by FilterModule objects '''
def filters(self):
return {'urlsubstr': self.urlsubstr}
def urlsubstr(self,content):
url = re.findall('http[s]?://(?:[a-zA-Z]|[0-9]|[$-_#.&+]|[!*\(\),]|(?:%[0-9a-fA-F][0-9a-fA-F]))+', content)
return url[0]
After creating the custom filter, I got the url like this:
- hosts: localhost
vars:
json_response: "{{ lookup('file', 'response.json') | from_json }}"
tasks:
- debug: msg="{{ json_response.content | urlsubstr }}"
with_dict: "{{ json_response }}"
This is the output of running my playbook:
TASK [setup] *******************************************************************
ok: [localhost]
TASK [debug] *******************************************************************
ok: [localhost] => (item={'value': u'({:url "https://the-file-I-want"})', 'key': u'content'}) => {
"item": {
"key": "content",
"value": "({:url \"https://the-file-I-want\"})"
},
"msg": "https://the-file-I-want"
}
Hope this helps.

Answer 2

To make the response json use the to_json filter, then navigate to the url key. That should give the value you're looking for: https://.....
Here's the documentation:
http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_filters.html#filters-for-formatting-data
The original response works on any case but it seems overkill unless there's a problem with the conversion to JSON, like in yours.
Nevertheless I think it might help me do something else I intend to do, which is why I was looking in here.