A prettier way to handle spaces with enters in YAML

This is more of a styling question. I have this ugly piece of code:

- name: download something
  shell: "wget https://www.{{ my_var }}\
    a_string\
    {{ a_very_long_string_to_show_what_i_mean }}"

In my opinion, this looks very ugly. Since the URL must be a ‘whole’, without spaces and quoting and whatnot, I need to escape each newline with a \. Yuck.

However, I can’t use breaks, e.g. > or | since that will include spaces in the end result, and the code will error.

Following the ansible-lint guidelines, I do not want the string size on a single line to be larger than something about 84 characters. In this example, when I have to download a file, I can’t simply put on a single line.

Expected output:

- name: pretty download something
  shell:
    wget https://www.{{ my_var }}
    a_string
    {{ a_very_long_string_to_show_what_i_mean }}

>Solution :

However, I can’t use breaks, e.g. > or | since that will include spaces in the end result, and the code will error.

That is actually only an half true statement.
You can combine it with the whitespace control mechanism of Jinja to remove those unneeded whitespaces.

Basically, adding a dash to the opening or the closing of an expression blocks do trim the extraneous whitespace or carriage return before or after it.

Given:

- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: no

  tasks:
    - debug:
        msg: >-
          wget https://www.{{ my_var -}}
          a_string
          {{- a_very_long_string_to_show_what_I_mean -}}
      vars:
        my_var: example.org/
        a_very_long_string_to_show_what_I_mean: _foo

This yields:

ok: [localhost] => 
  msg: wget https://www.example.org/a_string_foo

Note that in:

wget https://www.{{ my_var -}}

The dash on the opening moustache is not needed, because there is no extra space before that variable.