Restoring .proto file from descriptor string. Possible?

Question

Is it possible to decompile a string containing Protocol Buffers descriptor back to .proto file?

Say I have a long string like

\\n\\file.proto\\u001a\

Answer 1

In C++, the FileDescriptor interface has a method DebugString() which formats the descriptor contents in .proto syntax -- i.e. exactly what you want. In order to use it, you first need to write code to convert the raw FileDescriptorProto to a FileDescriptor, using the DescriptorPool interface.

Something like this should do it:

#include 
#include 
#include 

int main() {
  google::protobuf::FileDescriptorProto fileProto;
  fileProto.ParseFromFileDescriptor(0);
  google::protobuf::DescriptorPool pool;
  const google::protobuf::FileDescriptor* desc =
      pool.BuildFile(fileProto);
  std::cout << desc->DebugString() << std::endl;
  return 0;
}

You need to feed this program the raw bytes of the FileDescriptorProto, which you can get by using Java to encode your string to bytes using the ISO-8859-1 charset.

Also note that the above doesn't work if the file imports any other files -- you would have to load those imports into the DescriptorPool first.