How to skip some loops in Ansible playbook

Question

I am working with Ansible and I have a playbook where I have a task like this:

- name: Get remote system names
  xml:
    xmlstring: "{{ item.xml }}"
    xpath: "/rpc-reply/lldp/lldp-system-name"
    content: text
  loop: "{{ topology.results }}"
  register: names

where:

"topology": {
    "changed": false, 
    "msg": "All items completed", 
    "results": [............] }

So i am looping all the results and there inside i get an item.xml from each item of the results[]. Then, I receive a specific tag. My problem is that some tags do NOT have any value for the xpath: "/rpc-reply/lldp/lldp-system-name" , so I would like either to skip it or just replace it with something else, because for now I get an error and my task fails so my playbook does not work fine.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Not sure if this is the best solution but this is something you can do to skip the failed items. First collect the result of xpath matching to a variable and ignore error. Then loop through the collected result and use required data by skipping failed items using when: not item.failed .

- name: Get remote system names
  xml:
    xmlstring: "{{ item.xml }}"
    xpath: "/rpc-reply/lldp/lldp-system-name"
    content: text
  loop: "{{ topology.results }}"
  register: names
  ignore_errors: yes

- debug: var=item
  when: not item.failed
  with_items: "{{ names.results }}"