How to log Protobuf string in nested objects in a human-readable way?

Question

Given a proto file:

syntax = "proto3";
package hello;

message TopGreeting {
    NestedGreeting greeting = 1;
}

message NestedGreeting {
    Greeting g         


        

Answer 1

Answering my own question, I solved this issue by digging through Protobuf source code.

System.out.println(TextFormat.printer().escapingNonAscii(false).printToString(greeting))

Output:

greeting {
  greeting {
    message: "오늘은 무슨 요일입니까?"
  }
}

toString uses the same mechanism but with escapingNonAscii(true) (default when omitted).

Also see this answer for how to convert Octal sequences to UTF-8 characters in case you don't have access to the source code, only logs.

Answer 2

The protobuf binary format isn't human readable and you shouldn't attempt to make it so. There is a JSON variant if you need, but frankly it would be better to log the interpreted data, not the payloads.