content: /**
   * Copyright 2010 Karthik Kumar
   *
   * 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.hbasene.index;
  
  import java.util.List;
  
  /**
   * Encode the term positions as bytes.
   */
  public abstract class AbstractTermPositionsEncoder {
  
    /**
     * Encode the given term positions as a byte array.
     * 
     * @param termPositions
     * @return
     */
    abstract byte[] encode(final List<Integer> termPositions);
  
    /**
     * Decode the byte string represented by term positions and retrieve the
     * individual list.
     * 
     * @param value
     * @return
     */
    abstract int[] decode(final byte[] value);
  
    /**
     * Retrieve the frequency of the terms in the current document.
     * 
     * @param termFreqRepresentation
     * @return
     */
    abstract int getTermFrequency(byte[] termFreqRepresentation);
  }
  