How to escape special characters in the key of properties file?

java escaping properties-file
user1169474 picture user1169474 · Jun 14, 2013 · Viewed 59.6k times · Source

I've got a key = value property in the .properties file:

give names: (1) code = xxx

... but when I tried to get that key, it threw an error:

No message found under code give names: (1) code = xxx

I tried escaping the whitespace with \ but it didn't work.

Do I need to escape :,(, and ) characters as well?

Answer

Emil H picture Emil H · Jun 14, 2013

You could check out: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/Properties.html#load(java.io.Reader)

For info on how java interprets a properties file. The most relevant part is:

The key contains all of the characters in the line starting with the first non-white space character and up to, but not including, the first unescaped '=', ':', or white space character other than a line terminator.

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