Parsing string as properties

Question

I am reading a properties file from database. I checked java.util.Properties and there\'s no method to parse from a String instance. Is there any w

Answer 1

These two utility methods could write to and read from String via java.util.Properties object:

/**
 * Converts a {@link Properties} object to {@link String} and you can
 * also provide a description for the output.
 *
 * @param props an input {@link Properties} to be converted to {@link String}
 * @param desc  an input description for the output
 * @return an output String that could easily parse back to {@link Properties} object
 * @throws IOException If writing encounter a problem or if an I/O error occurs.
 */
private static String convert2String(final Properties props, String desc) throws IOException {
    final StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
    String propStr;
    try {
        props.store(sw, desc);
        propStr = sw.toString();
    } finally {
        if (sw != null) {
            sw.close();
        }
    }

    return propStr;
}


/**
 * Converts {@link String} to {@link Properties}
 * @param propsStr an {@link String} input that is saved via convert2String method
 * @return a {@link Properties} object
 * @throws IOException if an error occurred when reading from the {@link StringReader}
 */
private static Properties convert2Properties(final String propsStr) throws IOException {
    final Properties props = new Properties();
    final StringReader sr = new StringReader(propsStr);
    try {
        props.load(sr);
    } finally {
        if (sr != null)
            sr.close();
    }

    return props;
}

I found the above two methods useful when there are plenty of properties and you want to save all of them in a storage or database, and you don't want to create a huge key-value store table.