Decoding data to type with --decode

Similarly, we have the --decode flag, which takes a binary and returns the data into text format. Once again, here, this flag is mostly for debugging and, in our case, for learning.

Now, remember that we already did the opposite of decode. This means that we will be able to take the output of encode, redirect it to decode, and we should get our input back. This would look like the following:

input > encode > decode > input

So, let us start with the encode part. We are already familiar with it; we can just execute the following command:

$ cat user.txtpb | protoc --encode=User user.proto

Or, we could execute this command:

$ Get-Content user.txtpb | protoc --encode=User user.proto

We will redirect the standard output of these commands to a file for convenience. We can do this by redirecting to a file, like so:

$ … > user.bin

With that, we can now see how to use --decode. It is very similar to --encode. It takes...