Description
It would be very useful to add a text representation of AVRO data to the spec, and implement toString() and fromString() in all implementations. Faced with binary data, it'll be a useful operation to decode it for debugging, ad-hoc manipulation, etc.
I suspect the text format will:
- be JSON
- require the schema for full interpretation
- map easily onto the binary format (if the binary format has a signifier to take a specific branch of a union, the text format will have such a signifier as well)
- not be unique (there's more than one way to encode a given number (e.g., 0x0 == 0) or string (e.g., "\u0061" == "a", not to mention flexible whitespace)
- be compatible, for the binary type, with whatever is decided in
AVRO-36