If you treat it as a string (UTF8), you are likely to get garbage. If you treat it as a byte[], then you just get a BLOB - you don't lose anything, but you might not be showing some more detail that you could show.
You could, however, check for likely-sub-message-ness - i.e. after getting the length, you could try decoding the next few bytes as a variant, and do the shift trick; see if it looks likely to be a sub-message etc; you could try to validate the entire "string", see if it makes sense. Note that you don't have to store any of the data - just follow the rules for each wire-format until something doesn't look right or you've checked the string. Easiest, though, is to have the .proto available ;-p Marc 2009/11/14 rahul prasad <rahu...@gmail.com> > Hi, > > As seen from the below wire types table from protobuf documentation, if i > try to extract a value from a protobuf that is of type 2, it could either be > a string, byte array or a embedded message etc, If I cast the value as bytes > or string on the decoding side, while on the encoding side it was actually > an embedded message, what would this result in? Will I be able to retrieve > the actual value, someway or the other doing it this way? > > The available wire types are as follows: > Type Meaning Used For 0 Varint int32, int64, uint32, uint64, sint32, > sint64, bool, enum 1 64-bit fixed64, sfixed64, double 2 > Length-delimitedstring, bytes, embedded messages, packed repeated > fields3Start groupgroups (deprecated)4End groupgroups > (deprecated)532-bitfixed32, sfixed32, float > Regards, > Rahul Prasad > > > > > -- Regards, Marc --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Protocol Buffers" group. To post to this group, send email to protobuf@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to protobuf+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/protobuf?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
