org.apache.commons.codec.Decoder Maven / Gradle / Ivy
/*
* 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;
}