PROPERTIES file format is used by Java based applications. This file format is used to store the configurable parameters for any specific application.

The settings required for running any Java based application are stored in the form of strings in PROPERTIES file. Each property has its own unique string which is further divided into two parts. The first part known as key is used to store the name of the property and second part of string stores the value for that property. The PROPERTIES file is encoded using ISO-8859-1 format which is also known as Latin-1 standard. All other non-Latin characters are added using Unicode escape characters.