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      1 /*
      2  * Copyright 2001-2004 The Apache Software Foundation.
      3  *
      4  * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
      5  * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
      6  * You may obtain a copy of the License at
      7  *
      8  *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
      9  *
     10  * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
     11  * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
     12  * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
     13  * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
     14  * limitations under the License.
     15  */
     16 
     17 package org.apache.commons.codec;
     18 
     19 /**
     20  * <p>Provides the highest level of abstraction for Decoders.
     21  * This is the sister interface of {@link Encoder}.  All
     22  * Decoders implement this common generic interface.</p>
     23  *
     24  * <p>Allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Decoder
     25  * implementation in the codec package.</p>
     26  *
     27  * <p>One of the two interfaces at the center of the codec package.</p>
     28  *
     29  * @author Apache Software Foundation
     30  * @version $Id: Decoder.java,v 1.9 2004/02/29 04:08:31 tobrien Exp $
     31  */
     32 public interface Decoder {
     33 
     34     /**
     35      * Decodes an "encoded" Object and returns a "decoded"
     36      * Object.  Note that the implementation of this
     37      * interface will try to cast the Object parameter
     38      * to the specific type expected by a particular Decoder
     39      * implementation.  If a {@link java.lang.ClassCastException} occurs
     40      * this decode method will throw a DecoderException.
     41      *
     42      * @param pObject an object to "decode"
     43      *
     44      * @return a 'decoded" object
     45      *
     46      * @throws DecoderException a decoder exception can
     47      * be thrown for any number of reasons.  Some good
     48      * candidates are that the parameter passed to this
     49      * method is null, a param cannot be cast to the
     50      * appropriate type for a specific encoder.
     51      */
     52     Object decode(Object pObject) throws DecoderException;
     53 }
     54 
     55