Escaping backslash returns double backslash

Terraform
1

Single backslash not returning

Resulting value should be a single backslash but that isn’t the case. Variable is passing double backslasshes.


terraform version

Terraform v1.1.7

on linux_amd64

+ provider registry.terraform.io/paultyng/sql v0.4.0



variable "username" {

  description = "username"

  type        = string

  default     = "domain\\username"

}

output "username" {

  value = var.username

}

Expected Output


terraform plan

Changes to Outputs:

  + username = "domain\username"

Actual Output


terraform plan

Changes to Outputs:

  + username = "domain\\username"
2

The output you show is correct, a quoted string is displayed and the backslash must be correctly escaped. The actual string only contains a single backslash.

3

That is not correct, the variable passed in the variable contains 2 backslashes instead of the one. If you escape a backslash two backslashes are passed. I did figure out a way around it with just templating the value to get it to return a single backslash.

Template file:
${domain_name}/${user_name}

data "template_file" "logon_template" {
  template = file("${path.module}/logon.key")
  vars = {
    user_name = local.username,
    domain_name   = local.domain
  }
}

output "username" {
  value = data.template_file.logon_template.rendered
}
4

I’m not sure exactly what you are referring to, taking the first example shown, the output is

% terraform output username
"domain\\username"

And viewing the raw data you can see a single backsalsh.

% tf output -raw username
domain\username

The state also contains "value": "domain\\username", with a single escaped backslash in the json data.

The string template in the new example is using a forward slash, so it will not need to be escaped at all.

5

Ah, the little things! Thanks for the insights into using the raw switch, the provider keeps indicating bad username string so I thought it was the backslashes.