Human-readable representations in protobuf-net

Question

Does protobuf-net have any APIs to dump a protobuf into human readable form? I was hoping for something like TextFormat.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 14 '11 at 21:22

2

At the moment, no. I'm in two minds as to whether it is worthwhile adding; in my mind, this defeats most of the benefits of protocol buffers.

However, since Jon's version is a port of the java version you should find that it is feature compatible, so it should exist there.

answered Jul 14 '11 at 21:22

Marc Gravell

3

Thanks. Agreed that it would defeat the purpose of protobuf if it were used for serialization. However sometimes it's useful to be able to be able to dump protobuf objects for debugging purposes. I was thinking about writing a protobuf inspector for Fiddler so that I'd be able to read protobuf data over the wire when troubleshooting protocol issues. – pepsi Jul 14 '11 at 21:43
@pepsi - I just throw them into JSON – Marc Gravell Jul 14 '11 at 22:08

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 14 '11 at 21:24

1

there is one for java. the build.toString() method returns a string representation but you'll loose the serialization.

answered Jul 14 '11 at 21:24

ShadowFax

2 Answers2