Sometimes, We want to read the properties file that contains non-English characters.

For example, the properties file contains UTF-8 encoding characters. Default encoding for properties file reading is ISO-8859-1.

Spring framework loads the properties file in default encoding.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to read and write the content of a property file with a specified encoding in Java.

How to configure encoding for Spring boot to read

In this example, you will learn how to Read keys and their values from a property file spring boot application.

Let’s have properties file -application_fr.properties which contain non-English characters.

database=mysql
hostname=localhost
username=john
password=

There are many ways properties file read in spring core and boot applications.

One way is using PropertiesFactoryBean

  • create a Bean object of returning PropertiesFactoryBean using @Bean annotation
  • Inside create an object
  • set encoding using setFileEncoding method
  • configure to read properties file from ClassPathResource setLocation method
  • PropertiesFactoryBean factoryBean = new PropertiesFactoryBean(); factoryBean.setFileEncoding(“UTF-8”); factoryBean.setLocation(new ClassPathResource(“application_fr.properties”)); return factoryBean; }
Next, you can access properties file mapped to member variables using `@Value `annotation  with below syntax
```java
@Value("#{propertiesfilemapping['key']}")
private String name;

Another way, using @PropertySource annotation with value contains the name of file and encoding to `UTF-8

@PropertySource(value = “classpath:/application_properties.properties”, encoding=“UTF-8”)

Third way, Reading directly properties key with encoding

  • Configure PropertySource mapping
@PropertySource(value = "classpath:/application_properties.properties")

read individual properties with getProperty method with encoding

propertiesObject.getProperty("name").getBytes("ISO-8859-1"), "UTF-8")

How to read from property file containing utf 8 character in java

Reading properties file is an easy way to do in java.

You can apply encoding for file input stream as seen in the below example

import java.io.*;
import java.nio.charset.Charset;
import java.util.Properties;
import java.util.Set;

public class PropertiesReader {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Properties properties = new Properties();
        File file = new File("B:\\application.properties");

        try {
            FileInputStream inputStream = new FileInputStream(file);

            properties.load(new InputStreamReader(inputStream, Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
        } catch (FileNotFoundException fie) {
            fie.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        System.out.println(properties.getProperty("hostname"));
        Set<String> keys = properties.stringPropertyNames();
        for (String key : keys) {
            System.out.println(key + " - " + properties.getProperty(key));
        }
    }
}

Conclusion

You learned how to configure properties file to read UTF-8 character encoding in spring framework and boot as well as Java.