I am making requests to a public transportation API for data analysis. Several files are in JSON format, which is easy to deal with; however, some files are in .protobuf format.
I am curious how to parse these files into a human-readable format. For example, if I open the .protobuf file in a text editor, this is what I receive:
1"$
+(B���uC-(�̉�B
1462;
2"6
741127020 *F
�ZB�����C-(�̉�B
1583<
3"7
719255020 *10
K�B�8��C-FH@(�̉�B
1220<
4"7
Thanks!
Protobuffer is a binary format, so it's not human readable in it's raw state. To read it, go get the python bindings from Google and install with:
pip install --upgrade gtfs-realtime-bindings
Once you have those, you can download the pb file or read it locally very easily:
from google.transit import gtfs_realtime_pb2
import urllib.request
feed = gtfs_realtime_pb2.FeedMessage()
pb_url = "http://someURL/someFile.pb"
with urllib.request.urlopen(pb_url) as response:
feed.ParseFromString(response.read())
print(feed)
This will give you something like:
header {
gtfs_realtime_version: "1.0"
incrementality: FULL_DATASET
timestamp: 1579313685
}
entity {
id: "10-abc-O-1"
trip_update {
trip {
trip_id: "10-1622-O-1"
}
...
feed like so: from google.transit import gtfs_realtime_pb2 import urllib feed = gtfs_realtime_pb2.FeedMessage()