The signature for a Java PER encode method is as follows:

   public void encode (Asn1PerEncodeBuffer buffer)
      throws Asn1Exception, java.io.IOException

The buffer argument is a reference of an Asn1PerEncodeBuffer object that describes the buffer into which a message is to be encoded. This must be created and initialized before calling any encode method. See the description of this class in the Java Run-Time Classes section for details on how this class is used.

The PER encode methods do not return a value. This is different than the C/C++ version that returns a negative status value to indicate an encoding failure. For Java, errors are reported via the exception mechanism. All ASN1C Java exceptions are derived from the Asn1Exception base class. See the section on exceptions for a complete list and description of the various exceptions that can be thrown.