TOON to Protobuf Converter

Example: TOON input and real Protobuf output

The output below was generated by the same conversion code the converter uses, run on this sample when the page was built.

employees[4]{id,name,dept,salary,remote}:
  1,Alice Chen,Engineering,128000,true
  2,Bob Okafor,Sales,86000,false
  3,Carla Diaz,Engineering,119000,true
  4,Dan Weiss,Support,64000,false

employees {
  id: 1
  name: "Alice Chen"
  dept: "Engineering"
  salary: 128000
  remote: true
}
employees {
  id: 2
  name: "Bob Okafor"
  dept: "Sales"
  salary: 86000
  remote: false
}
employees {
  id: 3
  name: "Carla Diaz"
  dept: "Engineering"
  salary: 119000
  remote: true
}
employees {
  id: 4
  name: "Dan Weiss"
  dept: "Support"
  salary: 64000
  remote: false
}

Protobuf output is 102% larger than the TOON input. The same data is 324 characters as minified JSON and 532 as pretty-printed JSON. Sizes are character counts, not tokens: token counts depend on the model's tokenizer (see the tokenizer comparison). Across larger datasets, TOON averages about 43% fewer tokens than JSON (42.6%) according to the official TOON benchmark.

TOON to Protobuf: what changes

• Reading TOON: TOON is strict about structure: the [N] in an array header must match the number of rows, and each row needs exactly as many values as the {field} list. Hand-edited TOON that breaks either rule fails to decode.
• Writing Protobuf: Output is Protobuf text format: arrays become repeated fields and nested objects become message blocks. To encode binary Protobuf you still need a .proto schema with matching field names and types, and keys like @_id or opt-level are not valid field names.

Why Convert TOON to Protobuf?

Use Protobuf for high-performance internal APIs, microservices communication, or when you need maximum efficiency and have defined schemas.