A ruby library to read and write Java properties files.

Install via Rubygems

$ gem install java-properties

... or add to your Gemfile

gem "java-properties"

You can load a valid Java properties file from the file system using a path:

properties = JavaProperties.load("path/to/my.properties")
properties[:foo] # => "bar"

If have already the content of the properties file at hand than parse the content as:

properties = JavaProperties.load("foo=bar")
properties[:foo] # => "bar"

You can write any Hash-like structure as a properties file:

hash = {:foo => "bar"}
JavaProperties.write(hash, "path/to/my.properties")

Or if you want to omit the file you can receive the content directly:

hash = {:foo => "bar"}
JavaProperties.generate(hash)  # => "foo=bar"

As Java properties files normally hold UTF-8 chars in their escaped representation this tool tries to convert them:

"ה" <=> "\u05d4"

The tool also escaped every '=', ' ' and ':' in the name part of a property line:

JavaProperties.generate({"i : like=strange" => "bar"}) 
# => "i\ \:\ like\=strange=bar"

In Java properties files a string can be multi line but line breaks have to be escaped.

Assume the following input:

my=This is a multi \
   line content with only \n one line break

The parses would read:

{:my => "This is a multi line content which only \n one line break"}

In the opposite direction line breaks will be correctly escaped but the generator will never use multi line values.

1. Fork it!
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

Jonas Thiel (@jonasthiel)

For more information about the properties file format have a look at the Java Plattform documenation.

This gem is released under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for further details.