001/*
002 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
003 * contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
004 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
005 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
006 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
007 * the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
008 *
009 *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
010 *
011 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
012 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
013 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
014 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
015 * limitations under the License.
016 */
017
018package org.apache.commons.codec;
019
020/**
021 * Provides the highest level of abstraction for Encoders.
022 * <p>
023 * This is the sister interface of {@link Decoder}.  Every implementation of Encoder provides this
024 * common generic interface which allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Encoder implementation
025 * in the codec package.
026 *
027 * @version $Id: Encoder.java 1379145 2012-08-30 21:02:52Z tn $
028 */
029public interface Encoder {
030
031    /**
032     * Encodes an "Object" and returns the encoded content as an Object. The Objects here may just be
033     * <code>byte[]</code> or <code>String</code>s depending on the implementation used.
034     *
035     * @param source
036     *            An object to encode
037     * @return An "encoded" Object
038     * @throws EncoderException
039     *             An encoder exception is thrown if the encoder experiences a failure condition during the encoding
040     *             process.
041     */
042    Object encode(Object source) throws EncoderException;
043}
044