Escaping - character when reading from Java properites

I'm trying to read in a - value from a Java properties file, but it keeps giving me the value â and something like an epsilon (having issues pasting it)

I have no issues escaping the " but it seems like no matter what I do - is giving me issues. I've tried '-' and - and \- but nothing seems to be working.

@Test
public void readFromProperties() throws IOException
Properties options = new Properties();

FileInputStream in = new FileInputStream(Configs.optionsFi);
negComments.load(in);
in.close();

String option = options.getProperty("OPTION8");
System.out.println(negComment);



properties file:

OPTION8=asdf asdf asdf asdf asdf – "asdfasdf"


System.out.println result:

asdf asdf asdf asdf asdf âepsilonlikething "asdfasdf"


option

option

negComment

1 Answer
1

The – character in the property file is not a normal dash ('HYPHEN-MINUS' (U+002D)), but an 'EN DASH' (U+2013).

–

Documentation of load(InputStream inStream) explicitly specifies:

load(InputStream inStream)

The input stream is in a simple line-oriented format as specified in load(Reader) and is assumed to use the ISO 8859-1 character encoding; that is each byte is one Latin1 character.

Your property file is in UTF-8, so you get that character encoding error.

There are 3 ways to fix the problem:

Assuming that you intended a normal dash, replace the – with a -,

and make sure you save the file in ISO 8859-1 aka Latin1 aka Windows-1252.

–

-

Encode the character, i.e. replace – with u2013,

and make sure you save the file in ISO 8859-1 aka Latin1 aka Windows-1252.

–

u2013

Read the file using UTF-8:

try (BufferedReader in = Files.newBufferedReader(Paths.get(Configs.optionsFi)))
options.load(in);



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