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For one project I need to insert the content of a local file into another file on the remote system, and the first file happens to be JSON. The JSON file is in compact format (jq --compact-output) and is supposed to stay this way. When Ansible reads the content of the file, it determines that the content is JSON, and parses the content into the variable - and along the way is uncompressing the format. Not what I want.

To keep the file content as string, it is necessary to tell Ansible to handle this as string.

Reading the file:

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- name: Read JSON from file
  set_fact:
    json_content: "{{ lookup('file', '/home/user/text-shrinked.txt') | string }}"

When writing the file on the remote host (simplified):

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- name: Write JSON
  copy:
    content: "{{ json_content | string }}"
    dest: "/tmp/json.txt"

The usage of the string filter avoids parsing the content as JSON.