2009/9/4 Ceki Gulcu <ceki@qos.ch>

<snipped>

Can you think of a more elegant approach which still allows the user
to designate the charset for a given locale?

Hmm - it has become rather messy. Can I suggest an alternative tack: require the properties files to be always UTF-8 (or UTF-16 with a BOM). Then the original simple syntax is viable. KISS principle.

As far as producing UTF-8 files is concerned, I imagine a spreadsheet 'compiler' that will take a CSV, ODS or XLS file and extract the necessary separate properties files bundle. The spreadsheet would be a simple single sheet containing the keys in the first column and any number of translation strings in the following columns, each of which has the locale name as its header (e.g. "en_UK ").

Rick
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