/*
* Copyright 2001-2004 The Apache Software Foundation.
*
* Licensed 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 Decoders.
* This is the sister interface of {@link Encoder}. All
* Decoders implement this common generic interface.</p>
*
* <p>Allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Decoder
* implementation in the codec package.</p>
*
* <p>One of the two interfaces at the center of the codec package.</p>
*
* @author Apache Software Foundation
* @version $Id: Decoder.java,v 1.9 2004/02/29 04:08:31 tobrien Exp $
*/
public interface Decoder {
/**
* Decodes an "encoded" Object and returns a "decoded"
* Object. Note that the implementation of this
* interface will try to cast the Object parameter
* to the specific type expected by a particular Decoder
* implementation. If a {@link java.lang.ClassCastException} occurs
* this decode method will throw a DecoderException.
*
* @param pObject an object to "decode"
*
* @return a 'decoded" object
*
* @throws DecoderException a decoder exception can
* be thrown for any number of reasons. Some good
* candidates are that the parameter passed to this
* method is null, a param cannot be cast to the
* appropriate type for a specific encoder.
*/
Object decode(Object pObject) throws DecoderException;
}