Describing data

As we saw, the main purpose of the Protobuf text format is to describe data in a textual representation. In this section, we are going to see the EBNF syntax for each concept in the format. This will be a reference that is similar to what we did in Chapter 2. Similar to what we did there, some details will be omitted to make the whole thing more readable, but all these details can be found on the specification page here: (https://protobuf.dev/reference/protobuf/textformat-spec/).

Scalar values

The most important part of the text format is the definition of scalar values. We already saw some examples at the beginning of this chapter, but we are going to talk about some details here:

Code example 1 – Scalar field syntax

ScalarValue  = String
             | Float
             | Identifier
    ...