Reading from property file containing utf 8 character

Question

I am reading a property file which consists of a message in the UTF-8 character set.

Problem

The output is not in the appropriate format. I am using an InputStream .

The property file looks like

username=LBSUSER
password=Lbs@123
url=http://localhost:1010/soapfe/services/MessagingWS
timeout=20000
message=Spanish character are = {á é í, ó,ú ,ü, ñ, ç, å, Á, É, Í, Ó, Ú, Ü, Ñ, Ç, ¿, °, 4° año = cuarto año, €, ¢, £, ¥}

And I am reading the file like this,

Properties props = new Properties();
props.load(new FileInputStream("uinsoaptest.properties"));
String username = props.getProperty("username", "test");
String password = props.getProperty("password", "12345");
String url = props.getProperty("url", "12345");
int timeout = Integer.parseInt(props.getProperty("timeout", "8000"));
String messagetext = props.getProperty("message");
System.out.println("This is soap msg : " + messagetext);

The output of the above message is

You can see the message in the console after the line

{************************ SOAP MESSAGE TEST***********************}

I will be obliged if I can get any help reading this file properly. I can read this file with another approach but I am looking for less code modification.

Answer 1

Use an InputStreamReader with Properties.load(Reader reader) :

FileInputStream input = new FileInputStream(new File("uinsoaptest.properties"));
props.load(new InputStreamReader(input, Charset.forName("UTF-8")));

---

As a method, this may resemble the following:

  private Properties read( final Path file ) throws IOException {
    final var properties = new Properties();

    try( final var in = new InputStreamReader(
      new FileInputStream( file.toFile() ), StandardCharsets.UTF_8 ) ) {
      properties.load( in );
    }

    return properties;
  }

Don't forget to close your streams. Java 7 introduced StandardCharsets.UTF_8 .

Answer 2

Use props.load(new FileReader("uinsoaptest.properties")) instead. By default it uses the encoding Charset.forName(System.getProperty("file.encoding")) which can be set to UTF-8 with System.setProperty("file.encoding", "UTF-8") or with the commandline parameter -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 .

Answer 3

If somebody use @Value annotation, could try StringUils.

@Value("${title}")
private String pageTitle;

public String getPageTitle() {
    return StringUtils.toEncodedString(pageTitle.getBytes(Charset.forName("ISO-8859-1")), Charset.forName("UTF-8"));
}

Answer 4

You should specify the UTF-8 encoding when you construct your FileInputStream object. You can use this constructor:

new FileInputStream("uinsoaptest.properties", "UTF-8");

If you want to make a change to your JVM so as to be able to read UTF-8 files by default, you will have to change the JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS in your JVM options to something like this :

-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

Answer 5

If anybody comes across this problem in Kotlin , like me: The accepted solution of @Würgspaß works here as well. The corresponding Kotlin syntax:

Instead of the usual

val properties = Properties()
filePath.toFile().inputStream().use { stream -> properties.load(stream) }

I had to use

val properties = Properties()
InputStreamReader(FileInputStream(filePath.toFile()), StandardCharsets.UTF_8).use { stream -> properties.load(stream) }

With this, special UTF-8 characters are loaded correctly from the properties file given in filePath .