[jira] Commented: (HADOOP-6883) Text.toString violates its abstraction

["Owen O'Malley (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-6883?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12892820#action_12892820 ] 

Owen O'Malley commented on HADOOP-6883:
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I should also comment that I'm almost done with a patch that re-designs the generic serialization framework that includes native support for ProtocolBuffers, Thrift, Avro, and Writables. I already have all of the serializations working with both SequenceFiles and TFiles (with serialization layered on top named OFiles).

> Text.toString violates its abstraction
> --------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: HADOOP-6883
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-6883
>             Project: Hadoop Common
>          Issue Type: Bug
>          Components: io
>    Affects Versions: 0.20.1
>         Environment: Linux
>            Reporter: Gordon Sommers
>
> I stumbled upon this when encoding a google protocol buffer in base64, and storing it in a Text object for serialization. Compare the following two lines:
> byte [] decoded = b64.decode(val.getBytes())
> //this does not return the same bytes as below and the result, after decoding the base64 successfully, is a very mangled protocol buffer
> byte [] decoded = b64.decode(val.toString().getBytes());
> //YES, toString() FIXES IT
> Elsewhere in my code I also have: 
> Text curline = new Text(values.next().toString());
> byte [] raw = base64.decode(curline.getBytes());
> //This does work.
> It looks like the Text object must be toString'd (just once, somewhere, even if its later repacked in a Text) before it will have the proper byte representation. I would classify this as a leaky abstraction and ask that the reason please be isolated and the api fixed somehow so that other developers dont have to spend 3 days figuring out when Text.getBytes isn't returning the right bytes even though Text.toString prints exactly the right string representation and Text.toString.getBytes does return the right bytes.

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