String Operations in Ansible

Question

I am trying to check the distribution of a box I am deploying to with ansible. I have a database that has something like "ubuntu lucid" in a column for distro and I want to check both the distribution ansible_distribution and ansible_distribution_release. Is there a way to either concatenate those two strings to match them against my database value or to split the database value in the ansible role?

I am referencing the documentation here

Answer 1

You can concatenate vars with Jinja variable expansion:

"{{ ansible_distribution }}{{ ansible_distribution_release }}"

or split your database var with:

- name: Database var converted to a list
  debug: var="{{ item }}" 
  with_items: "database_var.split(' ')"