Grails 3.2 Resource Bundle does not display text with correct encoding

Question

Since Grails 3.2.8 (and above) the resource bundle within my application does not work as expected. German umlauts (or general UTF-8 chars that are not part from ASCII) are display with ��. E.g. the German word über is displayed as ��ber.

First I suspected the processResources Gradle tasks that performs native2ascii. But my UTF-8 resource bundle files are properly copied to build/resources/main/*.properties and converted to US-ASCII.

The source file is clearly encoding using UTF-8.

file -I grails-app/i18n/messages_de.properties grails-app/i18n/messages_de.properties: text/plain; charset=utf-8

after running ./gradlew clean processResources all the resource bundle files are successfully processed by native2ascii and encoded using US-ASCII.

file -I build/resources/main/messages_de.properties
build/resources/main/messages_de.properties: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

All non ASCII chars are escaped.

event.free.space={0,number} von {1,number} verf\u00fcgbar

While debugging my application running as a standalone WAR using

java -jar -server -Dserver.address=127.0.0.1 -Dserver.port=50000 \
    -Dgrails.env=prodMySQL -Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/./urandom \
    -Xmx768M -agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=5005 \ 
    build/libs/my.war

I noticed that the org.grails.spring.context.support.PluginAwareResourceBundleMessageSource loads my messages_de.properties file using UTF-8 encoding since it logs the following message.

s.PluginAwareResourceBundleMessageSource : Loading properties [messages_de.properties] with encoding 'UTF-8'

After loading the properties file into to the a java.util.Properties class, I see all non ASCII characters as e.g. �.

Any clue whats going wrong here?

Answer 1

I had a similar issue and for me the solution was in this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/34268213/6899501

in resources.groovy set the defaultEncoding to 'UTF-8' for the messageSource bean.