title: Using Python, how do I get a binary serialization of my Google protobuf message?
body: <p>I see the function SerializeAsString in the <a href="http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/reference/python/google.protobuf.message.Message-class.html" rel="noreferrer">protobuf Python documentation</a>, but like this suggests, this gives me a string version of the binary data. Is there a way of serializing and parsing a binary array of protobuf data using Python?</p>
  
  <p>We have a C++ application that stores the protobuf messages as binary data in a file. We'd like to read and write to the file using Python.</p>