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Java properties files are a mess. They still require Windows encoding (ISO-8859-1), which is incompatible with UTF-8.

ISO-8859-1 is Latin-1, there's nothing specifically "Windows" about it.

You're correct.

You were probably thinking of Windows-1252, which is an extension of ISO-8859-1 that supports more European character sets.

Only if you're still using java 8.

That's a common misconception.

Look at the documentation [0] or at the OpenJDK code. Both assume ISO-8859-1, unless you're dealing with a special case where resource bundles are involved.

[0]: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/21/docs/api/java.base...

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