content: /*
   * 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.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 1075404 2011-02-28 16:17:29Z ggregory $
   */
  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 ClassCastException} occurs
       * this decode method will throw a DecoderException.
       * 
       * @param source the 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 source) throws DecoderException;
  }  
  
  