What does the protobuf text format look like?

Question

Google Protocol Buffers can not only be serialized in binary format, also be serialized as text. However I can\'t easily find examples of such text; what would it look like?

Answer 1

Simplified, output from protoc.exe version 3.0.0 on window7 + cygwin

Demo message

$ cat demo.proto
   syntax = "proto3";  package demo;  message demo { repeated int32 n=1; } 

Create a protobuf binary data

$ echo n : [1,2,3]  | protoc --encode=demo.demo demo.proto > demo.bin

Dumping proto data as text

 $ protoc --decode=demo.demo demo.proto < demo.bin
    n: 1
    n: 2
    n: 3

And dump even if you don't have the proto definiton

    $ protoc --decode_raw < demo.bin  
    1: "\001\002\003"