C++ Protobuf to/from JSON conversion

Question

Is anyone familiar with a stable C++ solution (library, code snippet etc.) which converts protobuf messages to/from JSON?

protobuf messages *by themselves* don't really have enough info for that; I would just deserialize into an object model (protobuf), and the serialize (your choice of json engine) that... I don't use C++ though, so I don't know the exact options available there (it is a breeze with protobuf-net, but : different platform) — Marc Gravell, Aug 10 '11 at 09:11
Thank you very much for the idea, Marc. It would definitely save a lot of time. I'm also considering to try protobuf's reflection mechanism. Hopefully one of the approaches will work :) — Zaur Nasibov, Aug 10 '11 at 09:58
I think that using protobuf's reflection mechanism is a good approach to make a generic JSON serializer/parser from JSON to protobuf generated types. I've made something like this, but to CORBA IDL generated types in http://code.google.com/p/corbasim/ — Andrés Senac, Oct 05 '11 at 11:04
protobuf v3 supports JSON, see https://stackoverflow.com/a/44291335/757777 — Erik Sjölund, Dec 27 '17 at 08:26
I think this thread does not deserve to be closed, as it could be precious as information. — lrleon, Jan 11 '21 at 20:16

score 8 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 16 '13 at 22:27

8

This one is better IMO: https://github.com/shramov/json2pb

it does conversion in both directions and handles extensions

answered Nov 16 '13 at 22:27

haberlerm

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score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 11 '14 at 06:25

5

pbjson is another one, which built on rapidjson, maybe faster.

answered Feb 11 '14 at 06:25

yinqiwen

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This one did the trick for me. I tried `json2pb`first and had throuble getting it to work (and found little in the way of documentation). I didn't have much trouble getting this `pbjson` tool working with their test example, and I found that it took only a minor effort to edit their test driver to parse my data. – arr_sea Oct 30 '19 at 21:28
By the way, for what it's worth, the author of this `pbjson` tool says they drew inspiration from `pb2json`. – arr_sea Oct 30 '19 at 21:29

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 05 '11 at 15:34

I've made a bootstrap implementation of a JSON parser for protobuf generated types, using the its reflection mechanism, and adapting the parse I've made previously for CORBA IDL generated types.

You can find it at http://corbasim.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/protobuf2json_exported.zip

By this way for each protobuf defined message, you will be able to parse its instances by doing:

Foo foo;

const std::string json_foo = "{\"text\": \"Hello world\"}";

protobuf2json::json::parse(foo, json_foo);

It's just an initial implementation, and it just support string fields, but it's easy to implement all kind of fields.

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 14 '12 at 15:05

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pb2json is another C++ library that can do this.

answered Sep 14 '12 at 15:05

Mike Ohlsen

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C++ Protobuf to/from JSON conversion

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