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.

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();
}