Question

I’d like to use protocol buffer in my program to read data from a file. I also would like to be able to edit the data file with any text editor, for a start (I’ll write a data editor later on, and switch to full binary).

Is there a way to parse a human-readable format ? (debug string provided by protobuf itself, or some other format).

Answer 1

There is a text based format too, but support for this is implementation specific. For example, I don’t support it at all in protobuf-net. But yes: such is defined, and discussed (for example) here: http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/reference/cpp/google.protobuf.text_format.html

Personally, I’d rather use binary and write a UI around the model.