Using Python, how do I get a binary serialization of my Google protobuf message?

Question

I see the function SerializeAsString in the protobuf Python documentation, but like this suggests, this gives me a string version of the binary data. Is there a way of serializing and parsing a binary array of protobuf data using Python?

We have a C++ application that stores the protobuf messages as binary data in a file. We'd like to read and write to the file using Python.

Answer 1

Python strings can hold binary data, therefore SerializeAsString returns binary data.

Answer 2

.serializeToString(), despite its name, returns the bytes type, not the str type.

Part of what makes this confusing is that the method name remains unchanged, and they haven't updated the documentation; you just have to know that when they say "String" they mean bytes.