Nitin,

I haven't tried this myself, but if you absolutely need to use another
encoding for your properties file, you might be able to pull it off
using the Properties.load() method
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/Properties.html#load(java.io.I\
nputStream)
against your own InputStream which could read the Arabic-encoded file
and do the translations.

Just a thought.

Lenny

> Hello,
>
> I realise that I should have made the question more precise; however
> your interpretation is correct. Thank you for the response.
>
> Nitin
>
> --- In i18n-prog@yahoogroups.com, "eflarup" <eflarup@...> wrote:
> >
> > --- 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.