Question

I am trying to read Japanese string values from a .properties file with the code:

Properties properties = new Properties();
InputStream in = MyClass.class.getResourceAsStream(fileName);
properties.load(in);

The problem is apparently with the above code not recognizing the encoding of the file. It reads only the English portions and replaces the Japanese characters with question marks. Incidentally, this is not a problem with displaying Japanese text in Swing or reading/writing a UTF-8 encoded .properties file in an editor. Both things work.

Is the Properties class encoding-unaware? Is there an encoding-aware alternative that does not violate the security manager settings normally found in applets?

Answer 1

load expects ISO 8859-1 encoding, as noted in the docs.

In general you’ll want to use native2ascii to convert property files, load using a reader, or use XML where you can specify encoding.