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Bug 155934

Summary:	Allow loading/saving of UTF-8 encoded property files
Product:	utilities	Reporter:	akochnev <akochnev>
Component:	Properties	Assignee:	issues@utilities <issues>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE
Severity:	blocker	CC:	jglick
Priority:	P3
Version:	6.x
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Issue Type:	ENHANCEMENT	Exception Reporter:

Description akochnev 2008-12-22 13:32:54 UTC

Currently (per property file specification) property files are loaded and stored in ISO-8859-1 encoding (disregarding
the encoding specified for the project. As a result, editing a UTF-8 property file (and saving it as such) becomes
unnecessarily difficult: I  have to rename the file to .txt, edit it as a text file, edit it, save it and then rename it
back to .properties file . THe alternative is to use another editor (e.g. vi) to edit this property file. 

There seem to be well known workarounds for this issue (e.g.
http://dirk.net/2008/12/11/utf-8-encoding-in-netbeans-editor-on-linux/ ,
http://ditoinfo.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/netbeans-and-utf8-encoding-2/), but they don't seem to apply to property files. 

The specific use case for this is that I was trying to contribute a localization patch to Tapestry 5, which incidentally
uses UTF-8 encoded property files.

Comment 1 Jesse Glick 2010-07-07 18:08:25 UTC

ISO-8859-1 is the standard encoding for properties files since the beginning of Java; other characters must be escaped. There is an open RFE to detect other encodings, but it cannot be reliable since the file itself does not specify its encoding.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 75906 ***

Comment 2 akochnev 2010-07-07 22:09:14 UTC

I guess the idea here was not to change the default encoding for property files - as you mention, by the default encoding is already specified. 

The idea here is to be able to change the encoding, if for whatever reason, I needed a property file saved in an encoding that's not the default.