Can someone please assist how to fix this issue, why i am getting this error while running the Ansible playbook
2023-03-31 11:47:39,902 p=57332 u=NI40153964 n=ansible | An exception occurred during task execution. To see the full traceback, use -vvv. The error was: re.error: global flags not at the start of the expression at position 1 2023-03-31 11:47:39,903 p=57332
Python & Ansible versions:
The YML file which I am using as
- name: rename log file to user specific
delegate_to: localhost
command: mv ~/.ansible/wmDeployment.log ~/.ansible/wmDeployment_{{_user}}.log
register: logfile_rename_output
run_once: true
ignore_errors: yes
- name: set the fact for email
set_fact:
package_list: "{{hostvars['localhost']['package_list']}}"
log_output: "{{log_data| regex_search('((?s)(?<=This task is to install package in target servers).*?(?=This task is to enable kafka consumers and send mail of playbook log))')}}"
emailkey: code
cacheable: true
The error message is saying you need to put the (?s) at the very beginning of the regex. Alternatively, try something like
log_output: "{{log_data| regex_search('(?s:(?<=This task is to install package in target servers)(.*?)(?=This task is to enable kafka consumers and send mail of playbook log))"
In some more detail, (?s) says "I want the s flag for everything here" or, in other words, a global flag. Python requires this to go at the very beginning of the regex, presumably to avoid weird and hard-to-debug problems which could happen if you had (?s) embedded somewhere in the middle of a long and complex regex. In fact, you could even argue that it's more likely a programming mistake than a considered, conscious decision.
By contrast, (?s:...) says "I want to apply the s flag to the following subexpression," up to just before the closing parenthesis; this is obviously local to just the parenthesized subexpression, and could not be expressed by any other means.
In this concrete example, ((?s)foo) is invalid, but equivalent to either (?s)(foo) or (?s:(foo)) (or, in practice, ((?s:foo)); or, if you don't actually care about the capturing group, simply (?s:foo)).