Looks like the default MyFaces implementation uses the standard PropertyResourceBundle, which uses the standard Properties class that in turn assumes only Latin-1 as encoding of the property file. That naturally breaks all the UTF-8 encoded double-byte characters in the properties file. I definitely don't want to use native2ascii, which is just too much hassle, but just simply encode my Properties files as UTF-8.
I'm surprised that I seem to be the first person hitting this problem. I search the mail archives for "utf*" but got nothing on this. I assume and recall reading from some place that you could replace the default ResourceBundle implementation, similarly to overriding other configuration in JSF's pluggable architecture. Anybody done this and care to share any samples? Struts implements its own resource classes that deal with UTF-8 encoded files properly. In fact, those classes are not even inherited or using any of the ResourceBundle/Properties base classes. Anybody done an adaptation of that code as a ResourceBundle? A few months ago, I looked around quickly but couldn't find any easily available, does anyone know if there are any? Also, looks like HtmlResponseWriterImpl is encoding all characters out of latin-1 as unicode character references. For performance reasons, I don't think we should do that if the response stream specifies UTF-8 as encoding. There might be other complications that need to be considered, but I might file a bug on it later and patch it once I get the UTF-8 properties file working. (A little off-topic) Finally, I could also consider 1.5 Java Properties.loadFromXml(), but I'm a little hesitant to use it because of possible performance penalties and because I don't really need xml format. Don't really understand why Sun wouldn't just add support for UTF-8 for Properties.load() and store() since it shouldn't break anything. Anyway, anybody have any experience on loadFromXml and an opinion on pros and cons of it? The technical writers have barely wrapped their heads around the concept of parametrized resources, so I'm afraid introducing xml into the soup is just more confusing. Kalle
