UTF-8 encoding of application.properties attributes in Spring-Boot

Question

In my application.properties I add some custom attributes.

custom.mail.property.subject-message=This is a ä ö ü ß problem 

In this class I have the representation of the custom attributes.

@Component @ConfigurationProperties(prefix="custom.mail.property") public class MailProperties {     private String subjectMessage;     public String getSubjectMessage() {         return subjectMessage;     }     public void setSubjectMessage(String subjectMessage) {         this.subjectMessage = subjectMessage;     } 

And here I use my MailProperties:

@Service public class SimpleUnknownResponseMessage extends MailProperties implements UnknownResponseMessage{      private JavaMailSender javaMailSender;      @Autowired     public SimpleUnknownResponseMessage(JavaMailSender javaMailSender) {         this.javaMailSender = javaMailSender;     }      @Override     public void placeUnknownResponse(BookResponse bookResponse) {         MimeMessage message = javaMailSender.createMimeMessage();         try {             MimeMessageHelper helper = new MimeMessageHelper(message, "UTF-8");             helper.setSubject(this.getSubjectMessage());                         javaMailSender.send(message);          } catch (MessagingException e) {             e.printStackTrace();         }     } 

While debugging I can see that my this.getSubjectMessage() variable has this value inside: This is a ä ö ü à problem. So before sending my mail I already have an UTF-8 encoding problem.

I already checked the encoding of the application.properties file and its UTF-8.

My IDE(STS/Eclipse) and the project properties are also set on UTF-8.

How can I set the UTF-8 encoding for the text of my custom attributes in the application.properties file?

Answer 1

As already mentioned in the comments .properties files are expected to be encoded in ISO 8859-1. One can use unicode escapes to specify other characters. There is also a tool available to do the conversion. This can for instance be used in the automatic build so that you still can use your favorite encoding in the source.