ProperProperties

A ruby library to read and write Java properties files, which format is better described in the Java documentation.

Install via Rubygems or Gemfile

$ gem install proper_properties

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

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

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

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

You can write any Hash-like structure (with symbol or string keys) as a properties file:

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

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

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

Although ISO 8859-1 is assumed for Java properties files, they normally use UTF-8 encoding. This tool tries to convert them:

"ה" <=> "\u05d4"

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

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

In Java properties files there is distinction between natural lines and logical lines (than may span several lines by escaping the line terminator characters).

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

• Tnarik Innael (@tnarik)
• Jonas Thiel (@jonasthiel) : original project upto 1f2c4b008d69d0eae1084b1adfdea814e2b29899

For a proper description about the properties file format have a look at the Java Plattform documentation.

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