Sanity Tests » no-underscore-variable¶

In the future, Ansible may use the identifier _ to internationalize its message strings. To be ready for that, we need to make sure that there are no conflicting identifiers defined in the code base.

In common practice, _ is frequently used as a dummy variable (a variable to receive a value from a function where the value is useless and never used). In Ansible, we’re using the identifier dummy for this purpose instead.

Example of unfixed code:

for _ in range(0, retries):
    success = retry_thing()
    if success:
        break

Example of fixed code:

for dummy in range(0, retries):
    success = retry_thing()
    if success:
        break