erb - How to substitute a string (gsub) which contains legit backslashes?

Question

I had the following problem with erb in combination with Puppet, Hiera and templates:

Via Hiera I got the following strings as variables:

First the variable example in an array (data[example])

something with _VARIABLE_ in it

and variable example_information with

some kind of \1 and maybe also a \2

Now I wanted to substitute _VARIABLE_ in a Puppet template with the second string which contains a legit backslash () in it. So I did it like this:

result=data['example'].gsub('_VARIABLE_', @example_information)

So I took example out of an array and filled the placeholder with @example_information.

The result was as follows:

something with some kind of  and maybe also a  in it

There was no backslash as gsub interpreted them as backreferences. So how can I solve my issue to preserve my backslashes without double escape them in the Hiera file? I need the Hiera variable further in the code without double escaped backslashes.

Answer 1

I now made this to solve that specific problem as follows:

Variable again example

something with _VARIABLE_ in it

and variable example_information with

some kind of \1 and maybe also a \2

Code part in the template:

# we need to parse out any backslashes
info_temp=example_information.gsub('\\', '__BACKSLASH__')

# now we substitute the variables with real data (but w/o backslashes)
result_temp=data['example'].gsub(/__ITEM_NAME__/, info_temp)

# now we put together the real string with backslashes again as before
result=result_temp.gsub('__BACKSLASH__', '\\')

Now the result looks as follows:

something with some kind of \1 and maybe also a \2 in it

Note

Maybe there is a better way to do it but on my research I didn't stumble upon a better solution so please add comments if you know a better way to do it.