java.util.Properties encoding

Question

I get different results on two different systems and don\'t know why.

Properties prop = new Properties();
prop.load(new ByteArrayInputStream(input)); //input is          


        

Answer 1

Java .properties files are encoded with ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1), NOT UTF-8. All non-Latin-1 characters must be entered by using Unicode escape characters, e.g. \uHHHH.

An alternative is to use the XML format for properties, which IS UTF-8.

Source: Javadoc

Also see this SO question

And this one