Summary

In this chapter, we learned what Protobuf text format is and why we can use it. We saw that we could describe data as text, and Protobuf is able to read it to create a binary representation of it. This is useful for use cases where the main reader and editor of the data is a human. It lets us edit data and make sure that the data provided is valid by checking types. Finally, it lets us document the txtpb files by adding headers and comments. This helps future readers understand where they can find the proto file, the message definition for the data, and what some less descriptive parts of the data mean.

In the next chapter, we will see how to use the knowledge we have on proto files to generate code and decode binary, as well as the knowledge we have about txtpb to encode text to binary. This will be the last skill we need to be able to study the internals of serialization.