--- In i18n-prog@yahoogroups.com, "Nitin Jain" <nitinjain8766@...> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I am working on a java project, which needs to incorporate
> Internationalisation and Localisation. It has been suggested that the
> locale specific ".properties" (errormessages_ar.properties) that
> contain UNICODE equivalent of the Arabic text in my case.
>
> My questing is why not use the Arabic text messages rather than their
> UNICODE equivalent in the "xyz_ar.properties." file? What problems will
> this cause?
>
> All suggestions will be highly appreciated.
>
> Thank you,
> Nitin
>
I am not absolutely sure what the question is, but if you are asking
whether you can use an Arabic properties file encoded in a legacy
encoding, then the answer is NO. See the Properties class
specification here:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/Properties.html

"When saving properties to a stream or loading them from a stream, the
ISO 8859-1 character encoding is used. For characters that cannot be
directly represented in this encoding, Unicode escapes are used"

Hence the need to represent anything NOT in 8859-1 as Unicode escape
sequences.

And in any case, using anything other than Unicode on a Java project
makes absolutely no sense.