Question

I have an encoding problem in Eclipse (Indigo Service Release 1).
Here’s what happens:

I have a property file (language bundle) in German language and it is not displayed correctly when I open it in Eclipse. For instance: gelöscht is displayed as gel�scht. I have tried changing the File Association to Text Editor, Properties File Editor, JBoss Tools Properties Editor but it is shown like this in all cases.

The interesting part is that when I open the file in Notepad++ it is displayed correctly.
In Eclipse, the text file encoding is set to UTF-8, and the encoding of the file (according to Notepad++) is ANSI.

Is there another setting I do not know about? How can I fix this problem to see the correct encoding in Eclipse?

Answer 1

How are you reading the properties files? Storing them in any non-ASCII encoding other than ISO-8859-1 (the default encoding expected by various bits of infrastructure) or UTF-8 sounds like a bad idea to me. I would strongly recommend that you stick to either ASCII, ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8.

These days you can load Properties with any Reader, but UTF-8 is usually the most appropriate encoding to use for files which need to cope with non-ASCII characters and work on any machine.

You can probably force Eclipse to think of it as using a difference encoding, by right-clicking on the file, selecting Properties, and then selecting a “Text file encoding” at the bottom of the Resources page – but I would suggest that you don’t do that.

An alternative is to only use ASCII with appropriate \u.... escape sequences, as generated by native2ascii.

(While you can include non-ASCII ISO-8859-1 characters, I personally wouldn’t – it’s obvious when characters aren’t ASCII, but the distinction between ISO-8859-1 and other encodings gets trickier to spot with the naked eye.)