This module allows you to convert between text and binary forms of data.

For efficiency of I/O (see the ceylon.io module), Buffers are the core representation which ceylon.buffer.codec::Codecs output from the encode/decode operations, but it's still easy to get more general types like Arrays and Strings. Input to the operations can be any stream type.

ceylon.buffer.codec::Codecs are symmetrical, as any data that is encoded then decoded (or vice versa) with the same codec will be at least semantically equivalent to the starting data, and usually exactly equal.

ceylon.buffer.codec::Codecs come in four flavours: ByteToByte, ByteToCharacter, CharacterToByte, and CharacterToCharacter. The middle two are similar, yet kept seperate to support differing conventions around what encode and decode mean in particular codec families. To enhance efficiency, ByteToByteCodecs are offered as variants of some CharacterToByteCodecs where the Character form is comprised of ASCII characters only. These variants' output is the same as using the original plus encoding the characters with the ASCII charset.

There are three currently implemented codec families: charsets (UTF-8 for example), base encodings (like base64), and text ciphers (rot13 for example). See those packages for further documentation and examples of use.