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

Yes it should be possible to get some thing close get original definition. I do not know of any existing code to do it (hopefully some one else will).

Hava a look at how protocol buffers itself handles the String.

Basically

1. convert the string to bytes (using charset="ISO-8859-1" in java), it will then be a Protocol-Buffer message(format=FileDescriptorProto in java). The FileDescriptorProto is built as part of the Protocol-Buffers install.

2. Extract the data in the Protocol-Buffer message

Here is a File-Descriptor protocol displayed in the Protocol-Buffer editor