Publishing a string in to PubSub topic introduces quotes to the message

[JanPretzel]

Environment details

• OS: OS X 10.12.3
• Node.js version: v6.10.0
• npm version: 3.10.10
• @google-cloud/pubsub version: 0.9.0

Steps to reproduce

1. require @google-cloud/pubsub
2. publish a message topic.publish('someMessage') (as described in the documentation)
3. pull the message and it will have "someMessage" as data

I think this is caused because the message data is being stringified if it is not a Buffer here but I do not think it is the intended behaviour? At least the documentation does not make it clear.

[stephenplusplus]

This is intended. We consistently publish messages in JSON format so that a JSON parser on the receiving end has a predictable way to handle the messages it receives. When our library returns the messages, we do a JSON.parse to decode it back to its native JS form:

topic.publish('test')

subscription.on('message', function(message) {
  message.data === 'test'
})

[JanPretzel]

Thanks for the explanation @stephenplusplus, that explains a lot. The receiving end in my example was written in Ruby. It seems the Ruby API does not expect this behaviour. An alternate service publishing messages to the same queue was written in Python, no problems here. Shouldn't this inconsistency between the different APIs be documented?

[stephenplusplus]

I'm glad that cleared it up, and thank you for bringing it up. I don't know of a precedent or requirement that the client libraries are expected to behave the same way, but the fact that you experienced an annoying delay while you tried to figure it out and move on with your app is a good enough reason to me that we should add this in the docs somewhere. I'll keep the issue open and mark with a help wanted label-- feel free to send us a PR if you're up for it!

[stephenplusplus]

Fixed in #2212-- thanks again!

[JanPretzel]

Cool! Thank you too!