| /* |
| * 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; |
| |
| /** |
| * Provides the highest level of abstraction for Decoders. |
| * <p> |
| * This is the sister interface of {@link Encoder}. All Decoders implement this common generic interface. |
| * Allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Decoder implementation in the codec package. |
| * <p> |
| * One of the two interfaces at the center of the codec package. |
| * |
| */ |
| 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 source |
| * the 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 source) throws DecoderException; |
| } |
| |