Text format not interoperable with protoc about protoreflect HOT 3 CLOSED

Interesting that protoc produces something different than that created by the Go protobuf library, which is what I used to determine the text format. The protobuf developers page does not provide a spec for the text format, and I've read that it's not really meant for machine-to-machine communications, only for human consumption (which I guess is why it's not spec'ed?)

In any event, the Go protobuf library emits foo: < ... > for normal nested message fields but emits foo{ ... } for groups, which is both what protoreflect emits and expects to consume. I think it will probably be an easy change to relax this constraint so it can accept either for groups and nested messages.

from protoreflect.

Thanks for this detailed answer!

I agree that the text format does not look to be intended for interoperability, probably because the canonical JSON mapping is much better suited for that. However, since neither protoc nor grpc_cli support JSON for the moment, it would be really nice to remain compatible with their text format.

Looking at the C++ implementation, it seems that < ... > and { ... } can be used interchangeably. I have also noted a special handling of colons, maybe there are some other subtleties. Similar behaviors can also be found in the Golang implementation here and here.

from protoreflect.

Oh nice, you already fixed it, well done!

from protoreflect.