decode to json from command line

[KantarBruceAdams]

Bug: The man page does not state what format is used by the --decode and --encode options
Feature request: Add an option to decode directly to json.

Looking for a way to decode a message into json from the command line I stumbled upon:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34952811/is-there-a-definitive-nix-command-line-tool-for-inspecting-protocol-buffers

which mentions the --decode option which at first sight appears to be just what I was looking for.
However the output format is not in fact json but something called "text format" which is undocumented (see #3755).

My use case is that I am writing test cases to check the output of programs that send messages encoded using protocol buffers. I want to convert them to some format that can be analysed easily and add test assertions.
E.g.

ACTUAL=protoc --decode .... | jq .getSomeField
assertEqual "expected foo" "foo" "$ACTUAL"

[KantarBruceAdams]

note: I observed this on 3.5.0

[imranrazakhan]

Any update on this feature, is it available now? I couldn't find any option in

#protoc --version
libprotoc 3.6.1

Command:
protoc --decode=my.proto.PkgDiStatus controller.proto</tmp/di.bin

Output:

output is not json

    ups_status {
      low_battery: false
      no_power_out: false
      replace_battery: false
      common_fault: false
    }
    testing_mode: false

[hq6]

Since this has been part of the API for a long time, but was never added to the protoc tool, I wrote my own wrapper for this functionality.

https://github.com/hq6/ProtobufJson

[sg-rs]

@hq6 Thank you very much. It works

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