1 /*
2 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
3 * contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
4 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
5 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
6 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
7 * the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
8 *
9 * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
10 *
11 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
12 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
13 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
14 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
15 * limitations under the License.
16 */
17
18 package org.apache.commons.codec;
19
20 /**
21 * <p>Provides the highest level of abstraction for Decoders.
22 * This is the sister interface of {@link Encoder}. All
23 * Decoders implement this common generic interface.</p>
24 *
25 * <p>Allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Decoder
26 * implementation in the codec package.</p>
27 *
28 * <p>One of the two interfaces at the center of the codec package.</p>
29 *
30 * @author Apache Software Foundation
31 * @version $Id: Decoder.java 1157192 2011-08-12 17:27:38Z ggregory $
32 */
33 public interface Decoder {
34
35 /**
36 * Decodes an "encoded" Object and returns a "decoded"
37 * Object. Note that the implementation of this
38 * interface will try to cast the Object parameter
39 * to the specific type expected by a particular Decoder
40 * implementation. If a {@link ClassCastException} occurs
41 * this decode method will throw a DecoderException.
42 *
43 * @param source the object to decode
44 *
45 * @return a 'decoded" object
46 *
47 * @throws DecoderException a decoder exception can
48 * be thrown for any number of reasons. Some good
49 * candidates are that the parameter passed to this
50 * method is null, a param cannot be cast to the
51 * appropriate type for a specific encoder.
52 */
53 Object decode(Object source) throws DecoderException;
54 }
55