Convert Ansible variable from Unicode to ASCII - unicode

Question

I'm getting the output of a command on the remote system and storing it in a variable. It is then used to fill in a file template which gets placed on the system.
- name: Retrieve Initiator Name
command: /usr/sbin/iscsi-iname
register: iscsiname
- name: Setup InitiatorName File
template: src=initiatorname.iscsi.template dest=/etc/iscsi/initiatorname.iscsi
The initiatorname.iscsi.template file contains:
InitiatorName={{ iscsiname.stdout_lines }}
When I run it however, I get a file with the following:
InitiatorName=[u'iqn.2005-03.org.open-iscsi:2bb08ec8f94']
What I want:
InitiatorName=iqn.2005-03.org.open-iscsi:2bb08ec8f94
What am I doing wrong?
I realize I could write this to the file with an "echo "InitiatorName=$(/usr/sbin/iscsi-iname)" > /etc/iscsi/initiatorname.iscsi" but that seems like an un-Ansible way of doing it.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

FWIW, if you really do have an array:
[u'string1', u'string2', u'string3']
And you want your template/whatever result to be NOT:
ABC=[u'string1', u'string2', u'string3']
But you prefer:
ABC=["string1", "string2", "string3"]
Then, this will do the trick:
ABC=["{{ iscsiname.stdout_lines | list | join("\", \"") }}"]
(extra backslashes due to my code being in a string originally.)

Answer 2

Use a filter to avoid unicode strings:
InitiatorName = {{ iscsiname.stdout_lines | to_yaml }}
Ansible Playbook Filters

Answer 3

To avoid the 80 symbol limit of PyYAML, just use the to_json filter instead:
InitiatorName = {{ iscsiname.stdout_lines | to_yaml }}
In my case, I'd like to create a python array from a comma seperated list. So a,b,c should become ["a", "b", "c"]. But without the 'u' prefix because I need string comparisations (without special chars) from WebSpher. Since they seems not to have the same encoding, comparisation fails. For this reason, I can't simply use var.split(',').
Since the strings contains no special chars, I just use to_json in combination with map(trim). This fixes the problem that a, b would become "a", " b".
restartApps = {{ apps.split(',') | map('trim') | list | to_json }}
Since JSON also knows arrays, I get the same result than python would generate, but without the u prefix.