terraform plan produces invalid hcl when there are colons in property identifiers

[jleclanche]

Terraform Version

Terraform v0.12.1
+ provider.aws v2.13.0

Steps to Reproduce

I created a resource "aws_iam_role" with an assume_role_policy which changed. Part of that role policy had a key called SAML:aud. That key needs to be quoted in order to be valid in the plan output, but it was not.

Additional Context

Since the plan output is not actually meant to be used directly it shouldn't matter, but this may reflect a deeper potential issue with unquoted keys / keys with colons / etc.

[apparentlymart]

Hi @jleclanche! Thanks for reporting this.

Indeed this output is only configuration-language-like to aid in human understanding, and so this bug is just cosmetic in the renderer, but it would be better for the renderer to detect when the key isn't a valid identifier and render it in quotes as it would be in configuration input.

Because it is just a cosmetic thing we won't be able to prioritize working on this right now -- there are some other 0.12-related bugs we're working through already -- but we'll leave this on the list as something to polish at a later time. Thanks again!

[jleclanche]

@apparentlymart One concern is that whatever generates this output may be used elsewhere and the same bug will surface in situations where it'll actually be a problem, but I didn't look at the code to double check.

[apparentlymart]

Hi @jleclanche,

The code in question here is only ever used to produce output for human consumption. We don't use that codepath to create output for machine consumption; all of the machine-readable output codepaths produce JSON instead.

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