/**
* 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.hadoop.io;
import java.io.IOException;
/**
* Stringifier interface offers two methods to convert an object
* to a string representation and restore the object given its
* string representation.
* @param <T> the class of the objects to stringify
*/
public interface Stringifier<T> extends java.io.Closeable {
/**
* Converts the object to a string representation
* @param obj the object to convert
* @return the string representation of the object
* @throws IOException if the object cannot be converted
*/
public String toString(T obj) throws IOException;
/**
* Restores the object from its string representation.
* @param str the string representation of the object
* @return restored object
* @throws IOException if the object cannot be restored
*/
public T fromString(String str) throws IOException;
/**
* Closes this object.
* @throws IOException if an I/O error occurs
* */
public void close() throws IOException;
}