How to escape backslash and double quote in Ansible (script module)

Question

I\'m very new to Ansible (2.x) and I am having trouble using the script module and passing parameters with double quotes and backslashes.

Assuming we have a set vari

Answer 1

Don't be confused by the fact that ansible-playbook prints debug messages in JSON encoded form, so some characters are escaped.

set_fact:
  arg: \(-name "{{foo}}" \)

You have correct syntax. This will set arg to \(-name "bar" \) if foo's value is bar.
But the debug message in this case will look like this:

ok: [localhost] => {
    "arg": "\\(-name \"bar\" \\)"
}

Note that special characters for JSON (" and \) are escaped.

But there may be some issues with passing this as parameter.
If you call your script like this

script: path/somescript.sh "{{arg}}"

Parameter string will look like this "\(-name "bar" \)" which is actually 3 concatenated strings in bash: \(-name +bar+ \), so you will lose double quotes around the bar.

If you want to preserve those double quotes, use:

script: path/somescript.sh '{{arg}}'