Avoid escape characters and print raw data

[veera-chenna]

Hi @hairyhenderson ,

Use case is as follows,
If we take the following json object as datasource,
{ "test": "no\\escape"}

When I am trying to print the string, it is escaping the \\ and printing only \,
Command: gomplate --datasource=test=./test.json?type=application/json -i '{{ range $key, $value := (datasource "test") }}{{ $key }}={{ $value }}{{ end }}
Output: test=no\escape

We wanted to print the raw value of the key, which is test=no\\escape

Is there any option in gomplate which we can use to print a string with raw value?

[hairyhenderson]

Hi @veera-chenna, I've converted this to a discussion as this doesn't seem to be a bug or feature request.

When I am trying to print the string, it is escaping the \\ and printing only \,

To the contrary, the JSON string contains a \ which is escaped as \\, so gomplate is behaving correctly by un-escaping it as you output the value.

I think what you want to do is quote the string so that it's re-escaped. There are a few ways you could approach this, but one way is to use printf with the %q ("quote") formatter:

For example:

$ gomplate -i '{{ $s := "no\\escape" }}{{ printf "%q" $s }}'
"no\\escape"

You could also use the strings.Quote function, which is equivalent:

$ gomplate -i '{{ $s := "no\\escape" }}{{ strings.Quote $s }}'
"no\\escape"

Also equivalent in this case would be data.ToJSON:

$ gomplate -i '{{ $s := "no\\escape" }}{{ data.ToJSON $s }}'
"no\\escape"

However all of these methods are escaping the string for the purpose of quoting it, so you'll always end up with the string surrounded by double-quotes. If you want the literal raw string no\\escape, the correctly-escaped JSON input will need to be "no\\\\escape".

Hope this helps!