lookup module fail to compute value of a template using regex_replace filter

[Id2ndR]

ISSUE TYPE

• Bug Report

COMPONENT NAME

template

ANSIBLE VERSION

ansible 2.3.1.0
  config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
  configured module search path = Default w/o overrides
  python version = 2.7.13 (default, May 10 2017, 20:04:28) [GCC 6.3.1 20161221 (Red Hat 6.3.1-1)]

OS / ENVIRONMENT

N/A

SUMMARY

template action and template lookup give different results using regex_replace filter.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE

Playbook

- template:
    dest: /tmp/test.xml
    src: test.xml.j2
- copy:
    content: "{{ lookup( 'template', 'test.xml.j2' ) }}"
    dest: /tmp/test2.xml

template test.xml.j2

<command>ssh {{ command| regex_replace('"(.*)"', '"\\"\1\\""') }} #1</command>
<command>ssh {{ command| regex_replace('"(.*)"', '"\\"\\1\\""') }} #2</command>
{% set workaround_repl = '"\\"\\1\\""' %}
<command>ssh {{ command| regex_replace('"(.*)"', workaround_repl) }} #3</command>

EXPECTED RESULTS

I expect to get same /tmp/test2.xml after the two tasks

ACTUAL RESULTS

• when escaping once, template module fail to display the reference (update content here to point to ansible.github.com #1)
• when escaping twice, lookup module fail to dereference the reference (create ansible.github.com #2)
• using workaround_repl (escaping twice), it work's normally (Adding version and author to ansible init. #3)

[abadger]

The template lookup does this:

                    # do the templating
                    res = self._templar.template(template_data, preserve_trailing_newlines=True,                     convert_data=convert_data_p)

whereas the template action plugin does this:

            resultant = self._templar.do_template(template_data, preserve_trailing_newlines=True,                    escape_backslashes=False)

The difference in escape_backslashes is the problem here. escape_backslashes was added to the template action plugin due to #12198. I believe the right fix is to add the same thing (escape_backslashes=False) to the lookup plugin.

@bcoca, @jimi-c opinions from you?