How to open protocol buffer file

Question

For example I have protocol buffer file compressed in snappy-format

file.pbuf.sn

how can I view the file's content? Which programms are recommended to work with protocol buffers files?

Answer 1

There's two separate steps here:

• un-snappy the file container
• process the contents that are presumably protobuf

If you're trying to do this through code, then obviously each will depend on your target language/platform/etc. Presumably "snappy" tools are available from Google (who created "snappy", IIRC).

Once you have he contents, it depends whether it is a .proto schema, binary data contents, JSON data contents, or some combination. If you have a schema for the data, then run it through "protoc" or the language/platform-specific tool of your choice to get the generated code that matches the schema. Then you can run either binary or JASON data through that generated code to get a populated object model.

If you don't have a schema: if it is JSON you should be able to understand the data via the names. Just run it through your chosen JSON tooling

If it is binary data without a schema, things are tougher. Protobuf data doesn't include names and the same values can be encoded in multiple ways (so: the same bytes can have come from multiple sources values). So you'll have to reverse-engineer the meaning of each field. "Protoc" has a schema-less decode mode that might help with this, as does https://protogen.marcgravell.com/decode