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002 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one *
003 * or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file *
004 * distributed with this work for additional information *
005 * regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file *
006 * to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the *
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008 * with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at *
009 * *
010 * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 *
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015 * KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the *
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019
020 package org.apache.james.mime4j.stream;
021
022 import org.apache.james.mime4j.util.ByteSequence;
023
024 /**
025 * This interface represents an abstract MIME field. A MIME field must have a non <code>null</code>
026 * name and a content body (unfolded but unparsed and possibly encoded). Optionally implementing
027 * classes may also retain the original (raw) representation in a form of {@link ByteSequence}.
028 * <p/>
029 * Specific implementations of this interface may also use a richer model to represent the field
030 * if its body can be parsed into a set of constituent elements.
031 */
032 public interface Field {
033
034 /**
035 * Returns the name of the field.
036 */
037 String getName();
038
039 /**
040 * Gets the unparsed and possibly encoded (see RFC 2047) field body string.
041 *
042 * @return the unparsed field body string.
043 */
044 String getBody();
045
046 /**
047 * Gets original (raw) representation of the field, if available,
048 * <code>null</code> otherwise.
049 */
050 ByteSequence getRaw();
051
052 }