01: /*
02: * Copyright 2001-2004 The Apache Software Foundation.
03: *
04: * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
05: * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
06: * You may obtain a copy of the License at
07: *
08: * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
09: *
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: }
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