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I have an object that I de-serialize using protobuf in Python. When I print the object it looks like a python object, however when I try to convert it to json I have all sorts of problems.
For example, if I use json.dumps() I get that the object (the generated code from protoc) does not contain a _ dict _ error.
If I use jsonpickle I get UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x9d in position 97: invalid start byte.
Test code below is using jsonpickle with the error shown above.
if len(sys.argv) < 2: print ("Error: missing ser file") sys.exit() else : fileLocation = sys.argv[1] org = BuildOrgObject(fileLocation) org = org.Deserialize() #print (org) jsonObj = jsonpickle.encode(org) print (jsonObj) 
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JSON is limited to certain python objects, and it cannot serialize every python object. Protobuf supports a wider range of data types when compared to JSON. For example, enumerations and methods are supported by Protobuf and not supported by JSON. JSON supports only a subset of python data types.
JSON is usually easier to debug (the serialized format is human-readable) and easier to work with (no need to define message types, compile them, install additional libraries, etc.). Protobuf, on the other hand, usually compresses data better and has built-in protocol documentation via the schema.
I'd recommend using protobuf↔json converters from google's protobuf library:
from google.protobuf.json_format import MessageToJson json_obj = MessageToJson(org) You can also serialise the protobuf to a dictionary:
from google.protobuf.json_format import MessageToDict dict_obj = MessageToDict(org) Refer to the protobuf package API documentation: https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/reference/python/ (see module google.protobuf.json_format).
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