Spring Boot default properties encoding change?

Question

I am trying to find a way to set UTF-8 encoding for properties accessed via @Value annotation from application.property files in Spring boot. So far I have been successfully set encoding to my own properties sources by creating a bean:

@Bean
@Primary
public PropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer placeholderConfigurer(){
    PropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer configurer = new PropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer();
    configurer.setLocation(new ClassPathResource("app.properties");
    configurer.setFileEncoding("UTF-8");
    return configurer;
}

Such solution presents two problems. For once, it does NOT work with "application.properties" locations used by default by Spring Boot (http://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/boot-features-external-config.html#boot-features-external-config), and I am forced to use different file names.

And the other problem is, with it I am left with manually defining and ordering supported locations for multiple sources (eg. in jar vs outside jar properties file, etc) thus redoing a job well done already.

How would I obtain a reference to already configured PropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer and change it's file encoding at just the right time of application initialization?

Edit: Perhaps I am doing a mistake somewhere else? This is what causes actual problem for me: When I use application.properties to allow users to apply personal name to emails sent from an application:

@Value("${mail.mailerAddress}")
private String mailerAddress;

@Value("${mail.mailerName}")
private String mailerName;                       // Actual property is Święty Mikołaj

private InternetAddress getSender(){
    InternetAddress sender = new InternetAddress();
    sender.setAddress(mailerAddress);
    try {
        sender.setPersonal(mailerName, "UTF-8"); // Result is Święty Mikołaj
        // OR: sender.setPersonal(mailerName);   // Result is ??wiÄ?ty Miko??aj
    } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
        logger.error("Unsupported encoding used in sender name", e);
    }
    return sender;
}

When I have placeholderConfigurer bean as shown above added, and place my property inside 'app.properties' it is resoved just fine. Just renaming the file to 'application.properties' breaks it.

Answer 1

Apparently properties loaded by Spring Boot's ConfigFileApplicationListener are encoded in ISO 8859-1 character encoding, which is by design and according to format specification.

On the other hand, the .yaml format supports UTF-8 out of the box. A simple extension change fixes the problem for me.