java.util.Properties encoding

Question

I get different results on two different systems and don't know why.

Properties prop = new Properties();
prop.load(new ByteArrayInputStream(input)); //input is byte[]

On both systems input contains "var=\\\Ä\\\Ü\\\Ö\\\ä\\\ü\\\ö" .

On my test system prop contains "var=ÄÜÖäüö" . (This is what I want)

On another system prop contains "var=\\xC4\\xDC\\xD6\\xE4\\xFC\\xF6" . This is input in hex, but why does Properties do this? I unfortunately know nothing about the other systems configuration.

Has someone an idea about the reason?

Answer 1

Java .properties files are encoded with ISO-8859-1 ( Latin-1 ), NOT UTF-8 . All non-Latin-1 characters must be entered by using Unicode escape characters, eg \\uHHHH .

An alternative is to use the XML format for properties, which IS UTF-8 .

Source: Javadoc

Also see this SO question

And this one