How can I lookup properties in a slurped file? - ansible

Question

According to the ansible documentation, I can use slurp to read a remote file.
I have a java properties file on a remote host that I want to slurp so I did:
- name slurp xyz properties
slurp:
src: /some/path/on/the/remote/my.properties
register: myprops
- debug:
msg: "{{ myprops['content'] | b64decode }}"
If I do that I get the content.
Now I want to use that conent in ansible. E.g. through a lookup. Something like this:
{{lookup('somePropertyInPropertiesFile', myprops['content'])}}
But this doesn't work since the lookup module only allows lookup in files.
How can I pass the slurped file to the lookup?
I'm using ansible 2.9.9

Answer 1

Given ansible lookups work on the control host, you can also get a file from remote to local using fetch module. Then use ini lookup to read a specific property from the properties file.
I couldn't test the code but something like below should work.
- name: Fetch my properties
fetch:
src: /some/path/on/the/remote/my.properties
dest: /tmp/
flat: yes
- debug:
msg: "content is {{ lookup('ini', 'content type=properties file=/tmp/my.properties') }}"
flat: yes will copy the file under /tmp without creating a dir with hostname in the given destination dir which is the default behavior. This might be useful if you have a single host or do not care if the file gets overwritten.

Answer 2

The answer of Moon is correct, but I want to add more details about java property files.
It seems that ansible can only hanlde simple java property files like:
user.name=robert
user.pass=somerandompassword
But the java properties file format also allowes values to span serveral lines, e.g.
targetCities=\
Detroit,\
Chicago,\
Los Angeles
When you have entries like this, ansible doesn't parse them correctly. Ansible's result is:
ok: [..............] => {
"msg": "content is \\\nDetroit,\\\nChicago,\\\nLos Angeles"
}
But the java Properties documentation say:
Properties are processed in terms of lines. There are two kinds of line, natural lines and logical lines. A natural line is defined as a line of characters that is terminated either by a set of line terminator characters (\n or \r or \r\n) or by the end of the stream. A natural line may be either a blank line, a comment line, or hold all or some of a key-element pair. A logical line holds all the data of a key-element pair, which may be spread out across several adjacent natural lines by escaping the line terminator sequence with a backslash character .
Thus
targetCities=\
Detroit,\
Chicago,\
Los Angeles
should be equivalent to
targetCities=Detroit,Chicago,Los Angeles
which is not the case as explained above.
EDIT
Sadly some property files, like tomcat's catalina.properties, can not be parsed at all.
fatal: [..............]: FAILED! => {"msg": "An unhandled exception occurred while running
the lookup plugin 'ini'. Error was a <class 'ConfigParser.ParsingError'>, original
message: File contains parsing errors: <???>\n\t[line 35]: u'org.apache.jasper.,org.apache.naming.,org.apache.tomcat.\\r\\n'\n\t[line 110]:
...