What is the best way to share values between Terraform and external programs?

Terraform
1

How do you share data between Terraform and other applications for automation? For example, Ansible, shell scripts, Python…etc.

What I can see are:

  1. 3rd party tools write the outputs to a local file, and then Terraform read the file content with file block.
  2. Use external data block. However, the outputs in 3rd party tools must be the JSON format.