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 * @version $Id: Decoder.java 797690 2009-07-24 23:28:35Z ggregory $ 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 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 */ decode(Object pObject)52 Object decode(Object pObject) throws DecoderException; 53 } 54 55