/* | |
* Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more | |
* contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with | |
* this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership. | |
* The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0 | |
* (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with | |
* the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at | |
* | |
* http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 | |
* | |
* Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software | |
* distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, | |
* WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. | |
* See the License for the specific language governing permissions and | |
* limitations under the License. | |
*/ | |
package org.apache.commons.codec; | |
/** | |
* <p>Provides the highest level of abstraction for Decoders. | |
* This is the sister interface of {@link Encoder}. All | |
* Decoders implement this common generic interface.</p> | |
* | |
* <p>Allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Decoder | |
* implementation in the codec package.</p> | |
* | |
* <p>One of the two interfaces at the center of the codec package.</p> | |
* | |
* @author Apache Software Foundation | |
* @version $Id: Decoder.java 797690 2009-07-24 23:28:35Z ggregory $ | |
*/ | |
public interface Decoder { | |
/** | |
* Decodes an "encoded" Object and returns a "decoded" | |
* Object. Note that the implementation of this | |
* interface will try to cast the Object parameter | |
* to the specific type expected by a particular Decoder | |
* implementation. If a {@link ClassCastException} occurs | |
* this decode method will throw a DecoderException. | |
* | |
* @param pObject an object to "decode" | |
* | |
* @return a 'decoded" object | |
* | |
* @throws DecoderException a decoder exception can | |
* be thrown for any number of reasons. Some good | |
* candidates are that the parameter passed to this | |
* method is null, a param cannot be cast to the | |
* appropriate type for a specific encoder. | |
*/ | |
Object decode(Object pObject) throws DecoderException; | |
} | |