title: How to parse messages from Kafka __consumer_offsets topic
body: <p>I'm using kafka-tool v 2.0.1 (<a href="http://www.kafkatool.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.kafkatool.com/</a>) to interact with kafka and I can easily see messages in the __consumer_offsets topic but I'm unable to understand what the messages are. The Keys, when read as a string, look perfectly normal (their values are the names of my consumer groups). </p>
  
  <p>The messages, however, are junk when viewed as strings so I'm guessing I need to parse and/or decompress the long byte array but I'm not sure how. In the docs (<a href="https://kafka.apache.org/0110/documentation.html#impl_zkconsumeroffsets" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://kafka.apache.org/0110/documentation.html#impl_zkconsumeroffsets</a>) I see that they are usually compacted but I don't really know anything beyond that.</p>