001    /*
002     * JBoss, Home of Professional Open Source.
003     * Copyright 2008, Red Hat Middleware LLC, and individual contributors
004     * as indicated by the @author tags. See the copyright.txt file in the
005     * distribution for a full listing of individual contributors. 
006     *
007     * This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
008     * under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as
009     * published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of
010     * the License, or (at your option) any later version.
011     *
012     * This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
013     * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
014     * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
015     * Lesser General Public License for more details.
016     *
017     * You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
018     * License along with this software; if not, write to the Free
019     * Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA
020     * 02110-1301 USA, or see the FSF site: http://www.fsf.org.
021     */
022    package org.jboss.dna.common.text;
023    
024    /**
025     * Interface for components that can encode text. This is the counterpart to {@link TextDecoder}.
026     * 
027     * @author Randall Hauch
028     * @see TextDecoder
029     */
030    public interface TextEncoder {
031    
032        /**
033         * Returns the encoded version of a string.
034         * 
035         * @param text the text with characters that are to be encoded.
036         * @return the text with the characters encoded as required, or null if the supplied text is null
037         * @see TextDecoder#decode(String)
038         */
039        public String encode( String text );
040    
041    }