Ansible Split

String data types are the most common and valuable in any development work. When working with Ansible, we might encounter instances where we must split a string into a list or multiple strings. Fortunately, Ansible’s Jinja2 templating engine offers a handy split filter to achieve this.

This tutorial explores the split function in Ansible and understands its workings using real-world examples.

Prerequisites:

To follow along with this post, ensure that you have the following:

• Familiarity with Ansible playbooks and tasks
• Installed Ansible on your machine

Ansible Split Function

In Ansible, the split() function allows us to divide or split a string into a list using a specified delimiter.

The function accepts two main parameters:

1. The string that you wish to split
2. The delimiter on which you wish to split the string

The syntax is as follows:

Examples:

Let us cover some basic examples of using this function in a real-world playbook.

Example 1: Basic Splitting

Suppose we have a “MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server,” string and we want to split it into a list of databases. We can run the playbook as follows:

Output:

Example 2: Dynamic Variable Splitting

Often, we might need to split a variable value rather than a hard-coded string. This is where we can use the dynamic variable splitting as demonstrated in the following:

Result:

Example 3: Splitting File Paths

Another use of the split function is in the processing of file paths. An example demonstration is as follows:

Output:

This extracts the “report.txt” from the given path.

Example 4: Using Split in Loop

Let’s take an example where we want to create multiple directories that are named after different databases:

Output:

Conclusion

You learned about the split function in Ansible. This function provides a clean way of processing and manipulating the string data.