Can I send a Protocol Buffer in a JSON object as a String type?

Question

I've been looking at this, and I want to wrap the binary data of a protocol buffers in a string with JSON.

What formatting do I use? I know a lot of things I've been reading mention base64. But

I have a byte stream on the server side of the objects I want in C#. My client is an android device... Java.

Language specific doesn't matter to me though.

Answer 1

You should be able to wrap the serialized protocol buffer in JSON the same way you would with any other binary data; base64 would probably be the obvious encoding to use since JSON itself cannot handle arbitrary binary data.

On the other hand you don't necessarily have to use JSON; you could consider just passing the serialized protocol buffer over the wire directly. Another approach would be to use the RPC framework gRPC , which uses protocol buffers natively and would handle all the encoding and decoding for you.