debug string function should be implemented as in C++ and Python

[ufechner7]

The C++ and Python API define a human readable serialization of protobuf messages which is very useful for logging and debugging.

Example:
est_system_state { header { time_rel: 0.0 } pos_east: 1 pos_north: 2 height: 3 velocity_w { vx: 8 vy: 0.1 vz: 0 } }

The C++ API is described here:
https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/reference/cpp/google.protobuf.text_format?csw=1#TextFormat

The current string representation is hard to read and to understand:
EstimatedSystemState(StateHeader(0.0,0,false,559105,0.0,0.0),#undef,#undef,1.0f0,2.0f0,3.0f0,0.5f0,0.4f0,0.0f0,150.0f0,20.0f0,22.0f0,0.0f0,0.2f0,0.0f0,8.1783904f-38,20.0f0,Velocity_W(8.0f0,0.1f0,0.0f0),#undef,Heading_D(3.0f0,4.0f0),Course_D(4.0f0,5.0f0),false,#undef,#undef,#undef,8.3320624f-36)

The field names are missing, undefined fields appear, spaces are missing and the names of the messages are in camel case, which is not the case in the C++ or Python string representation (there camel case is automatically converted to words in small letters, using underscores between the letters).

[tanmaykm]

Do you need this only for logging? Then till this is available here, you may want to look at what is provided by the JSON package (https://github.com/JuliaLang/JSON.jl).

[ufechner7]

Well, using JSON is not really an option, because I have already 15 programs that communicate with protobuf encoded messages over ZeroMQ sockets. In addition I have already 14 GB of log files that use the debug string notation from protobuf (see: https://bitbucket.org/ufechner/juliaexperiments/src/bd4d49a5fc83ccfb52c92b0fef17971964ca4701/log/2012-06-14_13-49-55_ProtoLogger.txt?at=master )

Currently I analyse the log files with a mix of C++ and Python. Python alone is too slow, but maintaining the C++ code is cumbersome, I would like to do this task with Julia. But I cannot do that before the protobuf.text_format interface is implemented.
This is not very urgent, and I could help implementing it.

[tanmaykm]

The primary hurdle in implementing this is the absence of any specifications. It needs digging through the C++ implementation to figure out the protocol. I will be able to take this up only after 2-3 weeks. Any help in implementing this is welcome!

[ufechner7]

Is there already a function to convert an enum value into the corresponding string?

[tanmaykm]

No, it's not there now. But it is possible to have some generic method to do this for all enums. Can you provide some examples/use cases?

[tanmaykm]

The recently added lookup method can be used to convert an enum value to the corresponding name.

[daniter-cu]

Is there any update on if this will be implemented soon?

[Drvi]

There seem to be multiple issues about text-format, closing this one in favor of #66. As a workaround, you can use protoc directly to translate between binary and text format, see this discourse post.