Ansible-vault errors with "Odd-length string"

Question

I'm running Ansible 1.8.2. I have a vaulted file created on another system. On that system it works without any problems. However, when I run it on my local system I get the following error:

$» ansible-vault --debug view vars/vaulted_vars.yml
Vault password:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/ansible-vault", line 225, in main
    fn(args, options, parser)
  File "/usr/bin/ansible-vault", line 172, in execute_view
    this_editor.view_file()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/ansible/utils/vault.py", line 280, in view_file
    dec_data = this_vault.decrypt(tmpdata)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/ansible/utils/vault.py", line 136, in decrypt
    data = this_cipher.decrypt(data, self.password)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/ansible/utils/vault.py", line 545, in decrypt
    data = unhexlify(data)
TypeError: Odd-length string

ERROR: Odd-length string

I tried to manually type in the password or copy-pasting it, but the error still happens.

What is going on here and how to fix this error?

Answer 1

In my case I had copied the vault variable from the mobaxterm output of ansible-vault encrypt. This also included whitespace at the end. Removing the whitespace solved the problem for me.