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  * @version $Id: Encoder.java 634915 2008-03-08 09:30:25Z bayard $
27  */
28 public interface Encoder {
29 
30     /**
31      * Encodes an "Object" and returns the encoded content
32      * as an Object.  The Objects here may just be <code>byte[]</code>
33      * or <code>String</code>s depending on the implementation used.
34      *
35      * @param pObject An object ot encode
36      *
37      * @return An "encoded" Object
38      *
39      * @throws EncoderException an encoder exception is
40      *  thrown if the encoder experiences a failure
41      *  condition during the encoding process.
42      */
encode(Object pObject)43     Object encode(Object pObject) throws EncoderException;
44 }
45 
46