Hi, quick question: How do you use an output as a string? e.g. I create a VM, and one of its outputs is its Public IP address (or DNS name). I then want to load an XML file and insert the Public IP into the file and use that in the next step. I can't do this because XML manipulation (or even search/replace) operations require strings and an Output is not a string. Any ideas?

Take a look at this section in our docs: https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/concepts/inputs-outputs/#outputs-and-strings there's some good information there that should help you

Thanks Piers, I can see how to use Output.Format(), but I'm not sure how I would, for example, load a string from a file and then format it. The parameter to Output.Format is a "FormattableString" and won't accept a plain string by the look of it.

If you have a string you don't need to deal with Output. Keep it as a string.

Since you want to interpolate your XML with the outputted IP address: when you have both the IP address output and the XML loaded as a string, do

ipAddress.apply(ip => do interpolation here);

which will give you your interpolated result as an output.

Thanks Joshua, That works for me. I couldn't work out how to do that with "Apply" before: I always thought it would just give me another "output" variable again, but, as you say, the "ip" parameter passed to the lamba is indeed a "normal" string so I can do what I need in there. Thanks for the help

Apply returns an output, but the real value is available inside the Apply.