Marshalling variables causes some characters to be unicode escaped

[bramca]

example script:

- name: parse_network_tag_data
  steps:
    - script: echo '{{.tag_data}}' | jq '.[].id' | perl -pe 'chomp;s/"(.+?)"/&id=\1/g;' | sed 's/^&//'

This results in the following variables:

{ 
  "step": {
    "script": "echo '[{\"createdAt\":\"2023-05-22T14:35:24.367570311+02:00\",\"id\":\"1d423a9c-2a6a-4bc9-afcf-b53f19403c9b\",\"key\":\"Test-Tag-0\",\"updatedAt\":\"2023-05-22T14:35:24.367570311+02:00\",\"value\":\"Test-Value-0\"}, {\"createdAt\":\"2023-05-22T14:35:24.367570311+02:00\",\"id\":\"e18e6f91-cd75-4bb9-8733-65eea005f11f\",\"key\":\"Test-Tag-1\",\"updatedAt\":\"2023-05-22T14:35:24.367570311+02:00\",\"value\":\"Test-Value-1\"}]' | jq '.[].id' | perl -pe 'chomp;s/\"(.+?)\"/\u0026id=\\1/g;' | sed 's/^\u0026//'"
   },
   "result": {
    "systemout": "id=1d423a9c-2a6a-4bc9-afcf-b53f19403c9b\u0026id=e18e6f91-cd75-4bb9-8733-65eea005f11f",
    "code": "0",
    "timeseconds": 0.154433031
   }
}

The '&' character is unicode escaped by '\u0026' in the result. This is caused by the json.Marshal (https://cs.opensource.google/go/go/+/master:src/encoding/json/encode.go;l=161)

This breaks following test steps that need this '&' as the result is used in a URL query.

Suggestion:
The Marshalling of variables into json could be done another way in Go to fix this escaping.

func JSONMarshal(t interface{}) ([]byte, error) {
    buffer := &bytes.Buffer{}
    encoder := json.NewEncoder(buffer)
    encoder.SetEscapeHTML(false)
    err := encoder.Encode(t)
    return buffer.Bytes(), err
}

Let me know if you think this is a good fix? Or should I consider passing the variable another way?

[yesnault]

I'm not sure about the suggested fix, but yes, it's a bug.