Escape special XML characters in Jinja2 with Ansible

Question

I've got a couple strings I'm trying to substitute into an XML file via Ansible with Jinja. The problem is they have some special characters in them like " and <. To get around this, I'm currently doing this for all the fields in question:

<option name="mystring" value="{{ string_in_ansible | replace("&","&amp;") | replace("'","&apos;") | replace("\"","&quot;") | replace("<","&lt;") | replace(">","&gt;") }}"/>

This is a bit verbose and not at all dry when using with multiple variables. Is there anything built in for this kind of case, or a better way to express this?

Answer 1

The thing you are looking for is escape, although in your specific circumstance you may actually be happier with xmlattr