Using Protobuf-net, I suddenly got an exception about an unknown wire-type

Question

(this is a re-post of a question that I saw in my RSS, but which was deleted by the OP. I've re-added it because I've seen this question asked several times in different places; wiki for "good form")

Suddenly, I receive a ProtoException when deserializing and the message is: unknown wire-type 6

• What is a wire-type?
• What are the different wire-type values and their description?
• I suspect a field is causing the problem, how to debug this?

Answer 1

First thing to check:

IS THE INPUT DATA PROTOBUF DATA? If you try and parse another format (json, xml, csv, binary-formatter), or simply broken data (an "internal server error" html placeholder text page, for example), then it won't work.

---

What is a wire-type?

It is a 3-bit flag that tells it (in broad terms; it is only 3 bits after all) what the next data looks like.

Each field in protocol buffers is prefixed by a header that tells it which field (number) it represents, and what type of data is coming next; this "what type of data" is essential to support the case where unanticipated data is in the stream (for example, you've added fields to the data-type at one end), as it lets the serializer know how to read past that data (or store it for round-trip if required).

What are the different wire-type values and their description?

• 0: variant-length integer (up to 64 bits) - base-128 encoded with the MSB indicating continuation (used as the default for integer types, including enums)
• 1: 64-bit - 8 bytes of data (used for double, or electively for long/ulong)
• 2: length-prefixed - first read an integer using variant-length encoding; this tells you how many bytes of data follow (used for strings, byte[], "packed" arrays, and as the default for child objects properties / lists)
• 3: "start group" - an alternative mechanism for encoding child objects that uses start/end tags - largely deprecated by Google, it is more expensive to skip an entire child-object field since you can't just "seek" past an unexpected object
• 4: "end group" - twinned with 3
• 5: 32-bit - 4 bytes of data (used for float, or electively for int/uint and other small integer types)

I suspect a field is causing the problem, how to debug this?

Are you serializing to a file? The most likely cause (in my experience) is that you have overwritten an existing file, but have not truncated it; i.e. it was 200 bytes; you've re-written it, but with only 182 bytes. There are now 18 bytes of garbage on the end of your stream that is tripping it up. Files must be truncated when re-writing protocol buffers. You can do this with FileMode:

using(var file = new FileStream(path, FileMode.Truncate)) {
    // write
}

or alternatively by SetLength after writing your data:

file.SetLength(file.Position);

Other possible cause

You are (accidentally) deserializing a stream into a different type than what was serialized. It's worth double-checking both sides of the conversation to ensure this is not happening.