Ansible - accessing hostname defined in another group

I had a use case where the target server I was running the ansible playbook against needed to know the hostname of another group (defined in the hosts file) that I passed in as an environment variable named "target_env".

Environment:
CentOS Linux release 7.3.1611 (Core)
ansible 2.9.9

The hosts file had three groups defined, with only one hostname associated with each group:

[development]
cs-dev.cherryshoe.org ansible_connection=local

[test]
cs-test.cherryshoe.org

[production]
cs.cherryshoe.org

i.e. I need target server cs-test.cherryshoe.org to know the hostname of target_env production.  In this case the target_env "production" had hostname cs.cherryshoe.org associated to it.

ansible-playbook cherryshoe.yml -u YOUR_USER_ON_TARGET_SERVER -k -K -e 'target_server=cs-test.cherryshoe.org' 'target_env=production'

These ansible magic variables didn't work:

- debug: var=inventory_hostname - had the hostname where the script was being run against (in this example cs-test.cherryshoe.org)
- debug: var=ansible_hostname - had hostname localhost

There were two solutions to this problem:
1. Access it via hostvars magic variable

- debug: msg="{{hostvars[inventory_hostname]['groups'][target_env][0]}}"

This works because the hostvars magic variable holds the following type of information that you can see when you debug the variable

- debug: var=hostvars

The "groups" attribute inside hostvars[inventory_hostname] has the "target_env" production and if you access the first element in the array it's "cs.cherryshoe.org", which is what we want:

"groups": {
    "all": [
        "cs-dev.cherryshoe.org",
        "cs-test.cherryshoe.org",
        "cs.cherryshoe.org"
    ],
    "development": [
        "cs-dev.cherryshoe.org"
    ],
    "test": [
        "cs-test.cherryshoe.org"
    ],
    "production": [
        "cs.cherryshoe.org"
    ],
    "ungrouped": []
}

2.  Another way to do this was a hash variable in a group variables file,

hostnames:
  development: cs-dev.cherryshoe.org
  test: cs-test.cherryshoe.org
  production: cs.cherryshoe.org

and access it using:
- debug: msg=""{{hostnames[target_env]}}"

These articles were helpful:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30650454/how-can-i-add-keys-to-a-hash-variable-in-ansible-yaml
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mastering_Ansible/nrkrDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=ansible+%22hash+variable%22&pg=PA37&printsec=frontcover