rawprotoparse

[!CAUTION] This has been depracated, in favor of rawproto, where I did similar stuff, but improved things a bit. You should use that, instead.

Very small raw protobuf parser.

This is similar to rawproto, but without anything around the schema-def.

Use this if you want a really light library, and don't need to generate the schema for some raw protobuf messages, or anything like that. It's fast & light. It has 0-dependencies, and can be used in just about any place that runs javascript (browser, nodejs, cloudflare-edge, deno, bun, etc.)

It can read a Buffer (nodejs) or Uint8Array of bytes, and outputs a JSON-encodable object.

usage

nodejs (module)

import rawprotoparse from 'rawprotoparse'
import { readFile } from 'fs/promises'

console.log(rawprotoparse(await readFile('somebinaryfile.pb')))

nodejs (commonjs)

const { rawprotoparse }  = require('rawprotoparse')
const { readFile }  = require('fs')

readFile('somebinaryfile.pb', (err, bytes) => {
  console.log(rawprotoparse(bytes))
})

web (module)

<script type="module">
import rawprotoparse from "https://esm.run/rawprotoparse"

console.log(rawprotoparse(someBytes))
</script>

options

rawprotoparse (buffer, { prefix = 'f', stringMode = 'auto', arrayMode = false })

• prefix - a string to put in front of the fieldnames
• stringMode - a string for what to do with buffers.
  • auto - try to guess if it's string or buffer, based on bytes
  • string - force a string, that may have escaped characters
  • buffer - outputs an array of bytes. I use a plain array so that you can encode to JSON easier
• arrayMode - a boolean that forces all fields to be arrays. This allows you to assume all values are arrays (not just repeated fields)
• valueHandler - a custom value-handler, if you want to do something special. See test for example.