IntelliJ and internationalisation: accented characters

Question

I have a java application which has a GUI in both English and French, using the standard Java internationalisation services. I wrote it in JBuilder 2005 on an old machine, and recently upgraded, which has meant changing IDEs. I have finally settled on IntelliJ, which I adore.

However, it doesn't seem able to handle the accented characters in my ListResourceBundle descendants which contain French. When I first created the IntelliJ project and added my source (which I did manually, to be sure nothing weird was going on behind the scenes), I noticed that all the accented characters had been changed into pairs of characters such as é. I went through the code and corrected all of these, and assumed that the problem was fixed.

But I find on running the (rebuilt) project that the pairs of characters are still showing, instead of the accented characters that I see in my code!!

Can someone who has done internationalisation in IntelliJ please tell me what I need to do to fix this?

Grateful TIA!

PS I'm on the Mac, BTW

Answer 1

Java resource bundles should only hold ascii and Unicode escape codes see [http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Intl/ResourceBundles/].

e.g. \u00d6ffnen for German Öffnen.

The command line tool native2ascii converts from your native format to ascii plus unicode escape codes. It is a bit of a hassle but not an Intellij but a Java problem.

Note: I use Intellij on a Mac to create programs localized in English, German and Japanese.

Answer 2

Two things --

First, make sure your files are being stored as UTF, and that your source control supports the encoding.

Second, consider using the resource bundle editing support built into IntelliJ http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/i18n_support.html