/*
* 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;
/**
* <p>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 whic allows a user to pass a
* generic Object to any Encoder implementation in the codec package.</p>
*
* @author Apache Software Foundation
* @version $Id: Encoder.java 634915 2008-03-08 09:30:25Z bayard $
*/
public interface Encoder {
/**
* Encodes an "Object" and returns the encoded content
* as an Object. The Objects here may just be <code>byte[]</code>
* or <code>String</code>s depending on the implementation used.
*
* @param pObject An object ot 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 pObject) throws EncoderException;
}