Introduction
Most of the portlets or any web application that we usually create, will make use of the properties file to read and display the localized contents/value present in it. The .properties file created will be of encoding type ASCII. And as we know, for displaying the japenese and other language it should be of UTF-8 characters. Even if the properties files are stored as UTF-8 encoding type, still the content displayed for some of the languages would be junk. The reason being when the properties file is read using resource bundle object it doesn't know whether the characters are of UTF-8 format. There should be mechanism to make this properties file available for the web application.
Most of the portlets or any web application that we usually create, will make use of the properties file to read and display the localized contents/value present in it. The .properties file created will be of encoding type ASCII. And as we know, for displaying the japenese and other language it should be of UTF-8 characters. Even if the properties files are stored as UTF-8 encoding type, still the content displayed for some of the languages would be junk. The reason being when the properties file is read using resource bundle object it doesn't know whether the characters are of UTF-8 format. There should be mechanism to make this properties file available for the web application.
We spent almost two to figure out this, hope this solves some time for you :)
Below are the steps that should be followed to make your web application to display the locale specific text:
Reading Properties file using Resource Bundle
a) Creating a proper properties file
First step would be to create a properties file with the encoding type UTF-8 format for all the locales. Inside the properties file have the locale specific text. eg. for japenese properties file,
portal.message=ポータル
Eventhough locale specific text is available for the web application to use it, the JVM treats all the contents as similar format. So option is to change the JVM settings to allow the UTF-8 characters. The other option would be to convert the existing UTF-8 characters into UNICODE characters so that it can be displayed normally.
But the problem is to have the unicode value in the properties file. It is hard to maintain and also not human readable. eg. the UNICODE value would be:
portal.message=ポータル
So there needs a mechanism to convert the UTF-8 characters to UNICODE at runtime or at compile time. And mostly we use ANT as the tool to build our projects to create the war file. So the idea should be implemented at the build level so that even the properties file can be human readable and also understood by underlying JVM.
b) Using native2ascii ANT task
Fortunately ANT provides option to use the native2ascii utility.
native2ascii: Converts files from native encodings to ASCII with escaped Unicode. A common usage is to convert source files maintained in a native operating systenm encoding to ASCII prior to compilation.
The option would be is to convert the properties file using the native2ascii utility so that the properties file entries will be converted to Unicode format. The Unicode format can be easliy be understood by any Operating system.
Sample ANT code for this is given below:
<!-- converting the properties file values to unicoce character values-->
<native2ascii encoding="UTF-8" src="${portletmodulename}/src" dest="${warfiledir}/WEB-INF/classes" includes="**/*.properties"/>
This convert all the UTF-8 characters into Unicode format at the build, so that even the web apps can use it. And also properties stored in the filesystem will be UTF-8 characters which is easily maintainable.
Reference:
Regards,
Elango
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