/*

  * 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;

 /**

  * Provides the highest level of abstraction for Decoders.

  * <p>

  * This is the sister interface of {@link Encoder}. All Decoders implement this common generic interface.

  * Allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Decoder implementation in the codec package.

  * <p>

  * One of the two interfaces at the center of the codec package.

  *

  * @version $Id$

  */

 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;

 }