how to remove 'u' from list output in ansible - ansible

Question

I'm trying to do a simple list to show all ports associated with a particular vlan and have this output to a csv.
Code works but can't figure out how can I get around removing the 'u' and the [] associated with the line 'InterfaceID' in the output. I know the array need to be converted to a string just wondering how I can do this without modifying the code too much.
Thank you in advance for any tips.
Code:
- name: parse output
set_fact:
vlan_output: "{{vlan_info.stdout[0] | parse_cli_textfsm(parse_template)}}"
- name: write lines to file
copy:
content: "{{ ['InterfaceID','VlanID','NAME'] | zip([item.INTERFACES,item.VLAN_ID,item.NAME]) | map('join', ', ') | join('\n') }}"
dest: "output.csv"
with_items: "{{vlan_output}}"
- debug:
var: vlan_output
Debug of vlan_output:
"vlan_output": [
{
"INTERFACES": [
"Gi1/0/2",
"Gi1/0/5",
"Gi1/0/7"
],
"NAME": "test",
"STATUS": "active",
"VLAN_ID": "10"
}
]
Excel Output:
InterfaceID, [u'Gi1/0/2', u'Gi1/0/5', u'Gi1/0/7']
VlanID, 10
NAME, test

Answer 1

While you cannot directly do that, once you upgrade version of python used by ansible to 3.x you get rid of these. Only Python 2.x does print unicode strings with u prefix. On 3 all are unicode anyway and the prefix is not printed anymore.
Keep in mind that the u is part of printing the data, is not part of the data itself.
If you try to parse as string an array that was converted to a string you are already doing something wrong.

Answer 2

Since you have a list of Interfaces, you can use the join filter to "join" the list items into a string. From the question its not clear if you'd like to join them with space or comma, but a small change, such as - item.INTERFACES|join(', ') will give (comma separated) - Gi1/0/2, Gi1/0/5, Gi1/0/7.
Example:
- name: write lines to file
copy:
dest: output.csv
content: "{{ ['InterfaceID','VlanID','NAME'] | zip([item.INTERFACES|join(', '),item.VLAN_ID,item.NAME]) | map('join', ', ') | join('\n') }}"
with_items: "{{ vlan_output }}"
Produces:
InterfaceID, Gi1/0/2, Gi1/0/5, Gi1/0/7
VlanID, 10
NAME, test