Problem with special characters in properties file

I have properties files for translation. One file is in English, the other one in Swedish. For each page I want translation for I have separate properties files e.g. home.properties, home_en.properties, help.properties, help_en.properties. I also have the files under source control (github).

When I open a certain file I get the text in odd format e.g.:

lbl_draftsMan=Föredragande
lbl_draftsManEpost=Epost föredragande

alternative text for the English file is:

lbl_draftsMan=Presenter
lbl_draftsManEpost=Email presenter

I notice in Github that the text in the Swedish file is normal there:

lbl_draftsMan=Föredragande
lbl_draftsManEpost=Epost föredragande

I have the following properties for the file:

Field Name: $MimeCharSet
Data Type: Text
Data Length: 5 bytes
Seq Num: 5
Dup Item ID: 0
Field Flags: SIGN SUMMARY 

"UTF-8"

Other properties files the same setting but there I do not have the coded character problem.

What is the reason for this? I assume Domino Designer is the root of the problem?

We had a similiar problem with our german property files. Although our setting was UTF-8, umlauts were displayed incorrectly. Only when we entered the umlauts in Unicode escape were the umlauts displayed correctly (e.g. ö --> \u00f6)

Property files are not UTF-8, you need to encode your content. Easiest way is a small standalone Java app reading you UTF-8 source and writing out using the Properties class. It takes care of encoding

Updates:

• there’s a command line utility: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/tools/windows/native2ascii.html

• save in Eclipse should do it too

• if you want to write your own code, use this a starting point (you want to remove the hardcoded file names). Should even work for emoji.

import java.io.FileWriter;
import java.io.Writer;
import java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets;
import java.nio.file.Path;
import java.util.Properties;
import java.util.Scanner;

/*
 * Demo of handling UTF-8 properties
 */

public class Umlaut {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        Umlaut u = new Umlaut();
        u.run("source.txt", "target.properties");
    }

    void run(String sourceFileName, String targetFileName) throws Exception {
        try (Writer writer = new FileWriter(targetFileName, StandardCharsets.ISO_8859_1);
                Scanner scanner = new Scanner(Path.of(sourceFileName), StandardCharsets.UTF_8)) {
            Properties properties = new Properties();
            while (scanner.hasNextLine()) {
                String line = scanner.nextLine();
                String[] splits = line.split("=");
                properties.setProperty(splits[0], escape(splits[1]));
            }

            properties.store(writer, "Transformed");
        }
    }

    String escape(String source) {
        final StringBuilder b = new StringBuilder();
        for (int i = 0; i < source.length(); i++) {
            char c = source.charAt(i);
            convert(c, b);
        }
        return b.toString();
    }

    void convert(char source, StringBuilder b) {
        if (source <= 0x7E) {
            b.append(source);
            return;
        }
        b.append("\\u");
        String hex = "0000" + Integer.toHexString(source);
        b.append(hex.substring(hex.length() - 4));

    }
}