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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 Encoders.
 * 
 * This is the sister interface of {@link Decoder}.  Every implementation of Encoder provides this
 * common generic interface which allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Encoder implementation
 * in the codec package.
 *
 */
public interface Encoder {

    /**
     * Encodes an "Object" and returns the encoded content as an Object. The Objects here may just be
     * {@code byte[]} or {@code String}s depending on the implementation used.
     *
     * @param source
     *            An object to encode
     * @return An "encoded" Object
     * @throws EncoderException
     *             An encoder exception is thrown if the encoder experiences a failure condition during the encoding
     *             process.
     */
    Object encode(Object source) throws EncoderException;
}