Sceptre: Strings starting with 0 are identified as Octal in Sceptre User data

[laur1s]

Hi,

It seems that Sceptre somehow interprets variables starting with 0 as octal and converts them to decimal. This is a an Issue because we have user names that start with 0. Here is the example
Sceptre Config file:

sceptre_user_data:
  env:
    user: {{ var.user }}

sceptre --var "user=03303560" launch TEST/s3
When I execute this the value in the deployed cloudformation template becomes 886640.

Is it possible to do something about this?
Thanks!

[1oglop1]

Hi, this is probably due to how YAML works.

(more info: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54820256/how-to-read-load-yaml-parameters-with-leading-zeros-as-a-string)

I'd suggest to treat these numbers as strings 'user="03303560"' unless you really need it to be an integer starting with zero.

[laur1s]

Thanks @1oglop1 , that make sense. I need to figure out because actually I use sceptre --var "user=${USER}" launch TEST/s3 and then I pass User as env variable in gitlab-ci:

variables:
USER: 03303560

Therefore, I need to substitute $USER for 03303560

[1oglop1]

Blind shot, but try out this:

sceptre_user_data:
  env:
    user: !!str {{ var.user }}

https://yaml.org/type/str.html

here is what's going to happen (what I expect to happen):

1. supplied sceptre --var "user=03303560" will be rendered correctly from jinja
2. !!str 03303560 will make sure that whatever the value is, it's represented as string.

[laur1s]

After using !!str 03303560 the string was still converted to 886640