Question

I’m trying to read Hebrew values from a .properties file and I get gibberish. I’ve tried a couple of ways, including changing the file’s encoding (Cp1255, ISO-8859-8, UTF-8), adding a -file.encoding to the arguments and nothing helped.

This issue was raised during our migration to Weblogic from IAS (OC4J container), I noticed the javascript messages (which are read from a .properties file) appear as ???? ???, which does not happen on the OC4J. However, this only applies to data read from .properties files, everything else is shown fine.

I’ve been googling for a couple of days now and I haven’t been able to come up with a solution.

EDIT:
What I tried at home

ResourceBundle rb = ResourceBundle.getBundle("test");
System.out.println(rb.getString("test"));

This is what test.properties looks like:

test שלום

Output is: ùìåí

Answer 1

Since you have an instance of ResourceBundle and you can get the ISO-8859-1 encoded String with:

String strISO = rb.getString("test");

You can then convert this to UTF-8 and print it by using:

System.out.println(new String(strISO.getBytes("ISO-8859-1"), "UTF-8"));