// Copyright 2013 The Go Authors. All rights reserved. // Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style // license that can be found in the LICENSE file. // Package encoding defines interfaces shared by other packages that // convert data to and from byte-level and textual representations. // Packages that check for these interfaces include encoding/gob, // encoding/json, and encoding/xml. As a result, implementing an // interface once can make a type useful in multiple encodings. // Standard types that implement these interfaces include time.Time and net.IP. // The interfaces come in pairs that produce and consume encoded data. // // Adding encoding/decoding methods to existing types may constitute a breaking change, // as they can be used for serialization in communicating with programs // written with different library versions. // The policy for packages maintained by the Go project is to only allow // the addition of marshaling functions if no existing, reasonable marshaling exists. package encoding // BinaryMarshaler is the interface implemented by an object that can // marshal itself into a binary form. // // MarshalBinary encodes the receiver into a binary form and returns the result. type BinaryMarshaler interface { MarshalBinary() (data []byte, err error) } // BinaryUnmarshaler is the interface implemented by an object that can // unmarshal a binary representation of itself. // // UnmarshalBinary must be able to decode the form generated by MarshalBinary. // UnmarshalBinary must copy the data if it wishes to retain the data // after returning. type BinaryUnmarshaler interface { UnmarshalBinary(data []byte) error } // TextMarshaler is the interface implemented by an object that can // marshal itself into a textual form. // // MarshalText encodes the receiver into UTF-8-encoded text and returns the result. type TextMarshaler interface { MarshalText() (text []byte, err error) } // TextUnmarshaler is the interface implemented by an object that can // unmarshal a textual representation of itself. // // UnmarshalText must be able to decode the form generated by MarshalText. // UnmarshalText must copy the text if it wishes to retain the text // after returning. type TextUnmarshaler interface { UnmarshalText(text []byte) error }