Chinese characters in properties files are not properly decoded

Question

I have used localisation for my application in Chinese and English. It is a Spring MVC application and I am getting the values from a properties file. I have encoded the JSP pages in UTF-8 and mentioned UTF-8 encoding in web.xml also.

If I hardcode a Chinese character in the JSP page, it is displayed correctly, but the characters coming from the properties file are garbled and displayed like ç§ç®åç§°.

When I am doing wrong ?

the code that reads the properties file should specify the correct encoding of the file. — ZhongYu, Jun 13 '15 at 03:29
Nothing related with your JSP but more probably with your properties file — YMomb, Jun 13 '15 at 07:30

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 26 '18 at 06:33

The problem is that the Java properties files are/must/should been encoded in ´ISO-8859-1´ (Latin-1) by default. Thats an Java requirement.

To overcome this you can go two ways:

escape the not Latin-1 characters by UTF-8 sequences in the property file: back=Zur\u00EF\u00BF\u00BDck (german word ("Zurück") with some none Latin-1 charachters)
or you encode the properties files in UTF-8 and manipulate the way how Spring load the properties files.

I would go the first way (it is more standard) - Then I would recommend to use a tool like ResourceBundle Editor (it does the encoding stuff)

@See also this question and its answers:

Chinese characters in properties files are not properly decoded

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