Support Eastern Languages in Your Struts Web Applications : Page 2

Figure 3. Improperly Displayed Arabic Text

Intuitively, you would place Arabic text in the properties file and expect the application to display its home page in Arabic when a user selects Arabic. However, just putting the Arabic text in the properties files would result in the Arabic text displaying as question marks (see Figure 3) because text in the Properties file is not loaded in Unicode format.

You have to convert all Arabic characters to Unicode and write them in Unicode hex format in the properties files. Doing this manually is tedious. It's better to use native2ascii.exe, a utility located in the <JDK_HOME>\bin folder of the Java SDK. It converts the characters written in Arabic to Unicode.

To run native2ascii, write Arabic messages in a text file (call it 1.txt) and then run the following code:

native2ascii -encoding utf-8 c:\1.txt c:\2.txt

Figure 4. Properly Displayed Arabic Text

You can then copy the converted text from the output file (2.txt) to the Arabic properties file. (Find more information about native2ascii at java.sun.com.)

After doing this, you will see the Arabic version as shown in Figure 4.

Nothing Lost in Translation