Class IntEncoder

    • Constructor Detail

      • IntEncoder

        public IntEncoder()
        Default constructor, provided here for robustness: if in the future a constructor with parameters will be added, this might break custom implementations of this class which call this implicit constructor. So we make it explicit to avoid any such issue in the future.
    • Method Detail

      • close

        public void close()
                   throws IOException
        Instructs the encoder to finish the encoding process. This method closes the output stream which was specified by reInit. An implementation may do here additional cleanup required to complete the encoding, such as flushing internal buffers, etc.
        Once this method was called, no further calls to encode should be made before first calling reInit.

        NOTE: overriding classes should make sure they either call super.close() or close the output stream themselves.

        Throws:
        IOException
      • encode

        public abstract void encode​(int value)
                             throws IOException
        Encodes an integer to the output stream given in reInit
        Throws:
        IOException
      • createMatchingDecoder

        public abstract IntDecoder createMatchingDecoder()
        Returns an IntDecoder which matches this encoder. Every encoder must return an IntDecoder and null is not a valid value. If an encoder is just a filter, it should at least return its wrapped encoder's matching decoder.

        NOTE: this method should create a new instance of the matching decoder and leave the instance sharing to the caller. Returning the same instance over and over is risky because encoders and decoders are not thread safe.

      • reInit

        public void reInit​(OutputStream out)
        Reinitializes the encoder with the give OutputStream. For re-usability it can be changed without the need to reconstruct a new object.

        NOTE: after calling close(), one must call this method even if the output stream itself hasn't changed. An example case is that the output stream wraps a byte[], and the output stream itself is reset, but its instance hasn't changed. Some implementations of IntEncoder may write some metadata about themselves to the output stream, and therefore it is imperative that one calls this method before encoding any data.