Practical Ansible 2

Understanding Jinja2 filters

As Ansible is written in Python, it inherits an incredibly useful and powerful templating engine called Jinja2. We will look at the concept of templating later in this book, so for now, we will focus on one particular aspect of Jinja2 known as filtering. Jinja2 filters provide an incredibly powerful framework that you can use to manipulate and transform your data. Perhaps you have a string that you need to convert to lowercase, for example—you could apply a Jinja2 filter to achieve this. You can also use it to perform pattern matching, search and replace operations, and much more. There are many hundreds of filters for you to work with and in this section, we hope to empower you with a basic understanding of Jinja2 ...