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The Apache Commons Codec package contains simple encoder and decoders for various formats such as Base64 and Hexadecimal. In addition to these widely used encoders and decoders, the codec package also maintains a collection of phonetic encoding utilities.

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/*
 * 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.
 * 
 * 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.
 * 
 * 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;
}