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 * Provides the highest level of abstraction for Encoders.
22 * <p>
23 * This is the sister interface of {@link Decoder}. Every implementation of Encoder provides this
24 * common generic interface which allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Encoder implementation
25 * in the codec package.
26 * </p>
27 */
28 public interface Encoder {
29
30 /**
31 * Encodes an "Object" and returns the encoded content as an Object. The Objects here may just be
32 * {@code byte[]} or {@code String}s depending on the implementation used.
33 *
34 * @param source
35 * An object to encode
36 * @return An "encoded" Object
37 * @throws EncoderException
38 * An encoder exception is thrown if the encoder experiences a failure condition during the encoding
39 * process.
40 */
41 Object encode(Object source) throws EncoderException;
42 }
43