How to break a string over Literal Block Scalar in Ansible

Question

I have a variable in YAML script like that:

variable: |
  This is really long long line ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
  And this line is not really long ---------
  And I am just chilling here

I want to validate all my scripts through YAMLLint, so I have to break the first line in two without changing its contents.
How can I achieve this?

If I try to define it literally, I am getting something like this:

variable: "\
  This is really long long line ---------------------\
  ------------------------------------------------------\n
  And this line is not really long ---------\n
  And I am just chilling here"

I am getting something like this (note the spaces in the second 2 lines):

  This is really long long line ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   And this line is not really long ---------
   And I am just chilling here

And other options just doesn't work. How do I obey YAMLLint rules in this sutuation?

Answer 1

You are seeing this behaviour because you are explicitly adding newlines, and then, adding a carriage return for the rest of the text.

You can go around this multiple ways:

1. Add the carriage return before the explicit newline:

   variable: "\
     This is really long long line ---------------------\
     ------------------------------------------------------
     \nAnd this line is not really long ---------
     \nAnd I am just chilling here"
   

2. Use a blank line to add a newline:

   variable: "\
     This is really long long line ---------------------\
     ------------------------------------------------------
   
     And this line is not really long ---------
   
     And I am just chilling here"
   

3. Use a Jinja comment to control whitespaces:

   variable: |
     This is really long long line ---------------------{#- -#}
     ------------------------------------------------------
     And this line is not really long ---------
     And I am just chilling here
   

All the above would give you the expected and would pass an ansible-lint test:

This is really long long line ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
And this line is not really long ---------
And I am just chilling here