Question

I have a project where everything is in UTF-8. I was using the Properties.load(Reader) method to read properties files in this encoding. But now, I need to make the project compatible with Java 1.5, and the mentioned method doesn’t exist in Java 1.5. There is only a load method that takes an InputStream as a parameter, which is assumed to be in ISO-8859-1.

Is there any simple way to make my project 1.5-compatible without having to change all the .properties files to ISO-8859-1? I don’t really want to have a mix of encodings in my project (encodings are already a time sink one at a time, let alone when you mix them) or change all my project to ISO-8859-1.

With “a simple way” I mean “without creating a custom Properties class from scratch”.

Answer 1

One strategy that might work for this situation is as follows:

1. Read the bytes of the Reader into a ByteArrayOutputStream.
2. Once that is completed, call toByteArray() See below.
3. With the byte[] construct a ByteArrayInputStream
4. Use the ByteArrayInputStream in Properties.load(InputStream)

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As pointed out, the above failed to actually convert the character set from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1. To fix that, a tweak.

After the BAOS has been filled, instead of calling toByteArray()..

1. Call toString("ISO-8859-1") to get an ISO-8859-1 encoded String. Then look to..
2. Call String.getBytes() to get the byte[]