When working with PGBouncer's stats module through Ansible, many developers encounter an annoying issue where newlines appear as literal \n characters instead of actual line breaks. The raw output from PGBouncer might look clean in the database console, but when processed through Ansible tasks, the formatting gets mangled.

Ansible processes output strings through its templating engine, which by default escapes special characters. This behavior is generally helpful for preventing injection attacks, but becomes problematic when you need to preserve the original formatting of command output.

Here are several approaches to solve this issue:

1. Using the debug module with special parameters

- name: Display PGBouncer stats properly
  ansible.builtin.debug:
    msg: "{{ pgbouncer_stats_output | replace('\\n', '\n') }}"
  register: pgbouncer_stats

2. Custom filter plugin approach

Create a custom filter in your Ansible project:

# In filter_plugins/pgbouncer_filters.py
def fix_newlines(value):
    return value.replace('\\n', '\n')

class FilterModule(object):
    def filters(self):
        return {
            'fix_newlines': fix_newlines
        }

Then use it in your playbook:

- name: Process PGBouncer stats
  debug:
    msg: "{{ pgbouncer_stats_output | fix_newlines }}"

3. Command module with special piping

- name: Get and display clean stats
  ansible.builtin.command: >
    pgbouncer -c "SHOW STATS" | awk '{printf "%s\n", $0}'
  register: pgb_stats
  changed_when: false

- debug:
    var: pgb_stats.stdout_lines

After implementing any of these solutions, verify the output appears correctly:

TASK [debug] *******************************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "msg": "----------\n| OUTPUT |\n----------"
}

For more complex PGBouncer output that includes tables, consider using the community.general.prettytable filter:

- name: Format tabular output
  debug:
    msg: "{{ pgbouncer_stats_output | community.general.prettytable }}"

When working with Ansible to display output from PGBouncer's stats module, many developers encounter an annoying issue where newlines appear as literal \n characters instead of actual line breaks. This makes the output difficult to read, especially when dealing with formatted tables or structured data.

The issue occurs because Ansible's default output handler escapes special characters. While this is useful for logging and error handling, it's not ideal when we want to preserve the original formatting of command output.

debug Module with msg Filter /h2>

Here's how to properly display PGBouncer stats with preserved formatting:

- name: Get PGBouncer stats
  become: yes
  become_user: postgres
  command: psql -p 6432 pgbouncer -c "SHOW STATS"
  register: pgbouncer_stats

- name: Display formatted stats
  debug:
    msg: "{{ pgbouncer_stats.stdout }}"

ansible.builtin.copy /h2>

For more complex output formatting, you can write the output to a temporary file and then display it:

- name: Write stats to temp file
  ansible.builtin.copy:
    content: "{{ pgbouncer_stats.stdout }}"
    dest: "/tmp/pgbouncer_stats.txt"

- name: Display stats from file
  command: cat /tmp/pgbouncer_stats.txt
  register: stats_output
  changed_when: false

- name: Show clean output
  debug:
    var: stats_output.stdout_lines

For production environments, consider creating a custom filter plugin to handle the output formatting:

# In filter_plugins/pgbouncer_format.py
def pgbouncer_table_format(value):
    lines = value.split('\n')
    return '\n'.join([line.strip() for line in lines if line.strip()])

class FilterModule(object):
    def filters(self):
        return {
            'pgbouncer_table': pgbouncer_table_format
        }

Then use it in your playbook:

- name: Display formatted stats table
  debug:
    msg: "{{ pgbouncer_stats.stdout | pgbouncer_table }}"

• Always register command output when you need to process it later
• Use stdout_lines instead of stdout when working with line-based output
• Consider using the no_log: true parameter when dealing with sensitive output
• For complex output, create custom Jinja2 templates or filters