properties - Can the key in a Java property include a blank character?

Question

We are getting properties (that we can not influence) out of a database and want to access them by a key/value mapping. We are facing the problem that one of the property keys includes a blank character.

foo bar = barefoot

This is - correctly - interpreted as follows

key: foo
value: bar = barefoot

Is there a way to include the blank in the key so that it's not interpreted as the delimiter? I guess this behaviour is just like intended, but I thought I could give it a try here.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2108103/can-the-key-in-a-java-property-include-a-blank-character

Answer 1

As it seems the delimiter should be =, not space. Hence - keyValuePair.split("=") should do.

If you are loading this from a java .properties file, then you can extend java.util.Properties and override this method

public synchronized void load(InputStream inStream) throws IOException

so that it parses the properties correctly.