Java properties UTF-8 encoding in Eclipse

Answer for "pre-Java-9" is below. As of Java 9, properties files are saved and loaded in UTF-8 by default, but falling back to ISO-8859-1 if an invalid UTF-8 byte sequence is detected. See the Java 9 release notes for details.

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Properties files are ISO-8859-1 by definition - see the docs for the Properties class.

Spring has a replacement which can load with a specified encoding, using PropertiesFactoryBean.

EDIT: As Laurence noted in the comments, Java 1.6 introduced overloads for load and store which take a Reader/Writer. This means you can create a reader for the file with whatever encoding you want, and pass it to load. Unfortunately FileReader still doesn't let you specify the encoding in the constructor (aargh) so you'll be stuck with chaining FileInputStream and InputStreamReader together. However, it'll work.

For example, to read a file using UTF-8:

Properties properties = new Properties();
InputStream inputStream = new FileInputStream("path/to/file");
try {
    Reader reader = new InputStreamReader(inputStream, "UTF-8");
    try {
        properties.load(reader);
    } finally {
        reader.close();
    }
} finally {
   inputStream.close();
}

It is not a problem with Eclipse. If you are using the Properties class to read and store the properties file, the class will escape all special characters.

From the class documentation:

When saving properties to a stream or loading them from a stream, the ISO 8859-1 character encoding is used. For characters that cannot be directly represented in this encoding, Unicode escapes are used; however, only a single 'u' character is allowed in an escape sequence. The native2ascii tool can be used to convert property files to and from other character encodings.

From the API, store() method:

Characters less than \u0020 and characters greater than \u007E are written as \uxxxx for the appropriate hexadecimal value xxxx.

Don't waste your time, you can use Resource Bundle plugin in Eclipse

Old Sourceforge page

Properties props = new Properties();
URL resource = getClass().getClassLoader().getResource("data.properties");         
props.load(new InputStreamReader(resource.openStream(), "UTF8"));

Works like a charm

:-)