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 Encoders.
   * This is the sister interface of {@link Decoder}.  Every implementation of
   * Encoder provides this common generic interface whic allows a user to pass a 
   * generic Object to any Encoder implementation in the codec package.</p>
   *
   * @author Apache Software Foundation
   * @version $Id: Encoder.java 1075406 2011-02-28 16:18:26Z ggregory $
   */
  public interface Encoder {
      
      /**
       * Encodes an "Object" and returns the encoded content 
       * as an Object.  The Objects here may just be <code>byte[]</code>
       * or <code>String</code>s depending on the implementation used.
       *   
       * @param source An object ot encode
       * 
       * @return An "encoded" Object
       * 
       * @throws EncoderException an encoder exception is
       *  thrown if the encoder experiences a failure
       *  condition during the encoding process.
       */
      Object encode(Object source) throws EncoderException;
  }  
  
  