1 /* 2 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more 3 * contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with 4 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership. 5 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0 6 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with 7 * the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at 8 * 9 * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 10 * 11 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software 12 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, 13 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. 14 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and 15 * limitations under the License. 16 */ 17 18 package org.apache.commons.codec; 19 20 /** 21 * <p>Provides the highest level of abstraction for Decoders. 22 * This is the sister interface of {@link Encoder}. All 23 * Decoders implement this common generic interface.</p> 24 * 25 * <p>Allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Decoder 26 * implementation in the codec package.</p> 27 * 28 * <p>One of the two interfaces at the center of the codec package.</p> 29 * 30 * @author Apache Software Foundation 31 * @version $Id: Decoder.java 797690 2009-07-24 23:28:35Z ggregory $ 32 */ 33 public interface Decoder { 34 35 /** 36 * Decodes an "encoded" Object and returns a "decoded" 37 * Object. Note that the implementation of this 38 * interface will try to cast the Object parameter 39 * to the specific type expected by a particular Decoder 40 * implementation. If a {@link ClassCastException} occurs 41 * this decode method will throw a DecoderException. 42 * 43 * @param pObject an object to "decode" 44 * 45 * @return a 'decoded" object 46 * 47 * @throws DecoderException a decoder exception can 48 * be thrown for any number of reasons. Some good 49 * candidates are that the parameter passed to this 50 * method is null, a param cannot be cast to the 51 * appropriate type for a specific encoder. 52 */ 53 Object decode(Object pObject) throws DecoderException; 54 } 55 56
