I do not have any opinion on how properties files should be escaped other than the general recommendation to minimize diffs.

It would be lovely if `*.properties` could be in UTF-8, so we would not need to deal with escapes at all. Java 6 does make it possible to load these files in the encoding of your choice—but it also defines no way for tools like editors to _determine_ the encoding of such a file in a newly encountered source project, if not ISO-8859-1. While at Sun I argued for there to be a mandatory encoding header like

    #encoding=UTF-8

or simply a standard BOM, but to no avail.