What is Apron

Apron is a small library for reading and writing Java .properties files. The main goal of this library is to be compatible with the java.util.Properties class. Not API-wise (the API is quite different), but being able to read every Java .properties file and getting exactly the same key-value pairs as java.util.Properties does.

However Apron maintains the order of the entries in the properties files and also the comments, blank lines and whitespace before keys and around separators.

This allows writing .properties files back that do not differ from the original ones.

Since version 2.0.0 Apron provides the ability to reformat and reorder the content of .properties files according to different constraints.

Since version 2.1.0 Apron provides a wrapper to be used as a (nearly) drop-in replacement for java.util.Properties.

Apron was mainly written to be used in the Kilt toolset, but was intended from the start to be a general purpose library.