/*

  * 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 Encoders.

  * <p>

  * This is the sister interface of {@link Decoder}.  Every implementation of Encoder provides this

  * common generic interface which allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Encoder implementation

  * in the codec package.

  *

  * @version $Id$

  */

 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 to 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;

 }