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 Encoders.
22 * This is the sister interface of {@link Decoder}. Every implementation of
23 * Encoder provides this common generic interface whic allows a user to pass a
24 * generic Object to any Encoder implementation in the codec package.</p>
25 *
26 * @author Apache Software Foundation
27 * @version $Id: Encoder.java 480406 2006-11-29 04:56:58Z bayard $
28 */
29 public interface Encoder {
30
31 /**
32 * Encodes an "Object" and returns the encoded content
33 * as an Object. The Objects here may just be <code>byte[]</code>
34 * or <code>String</code>s depending on the implementation used.
35 *
36 * @param pObject An object ot encode
37 *
38 * @return An "encoded" Object
39 *
40 * @throws EncoderException an encoder exception is
41 * thrown if the encoder experiences a failure
42 * condition during the encoding process.
43 */
44 Object encode(Object pObject) throws EncoderException;
45 }
46