How to escape the equals sign in properties files

How can I escape the equals sign (=) in Java property files? I would like to put something as the following in my file:

table.whereclause=where id=100

In your specific example you don't need to escape the equals - you only need to escape it if it's part of the key. The properties file format will treat all characters after the first unescaped equals as part of the value.

Moreover, Please refer to load(Reader reader) method from Property class on javadoc

In load(Reader reader) method documentation it says

The key contains all of the characters in the line starting with the first non-white space character and up to, but not including, the first unescaped '=', ':', or white space character other than a line terminator. All of these key termination characters may be included in the key by escaping them with a preceding backslash character; for example,

\:\=

would be the two-character key ":=". Line terminator characters can be included using \r and \n escape sequences. Any white space after the key is skipped; if the first non-white space character after the key is '=' or ':', then it is ignored and any white space characters after it are also skipped. All remaining characters on the line become part of the associated element string; if there are no remaining characters, the element is the empty string "". Once the raw character sequences constituting the key and element are identified, escape processing is performed as described above.

Hope that helps.

Default escape character in Java is '\'.
However, Java properties file has format key=value, it should be considering everything after the first equal as value.

The best way to avoid this kind of issues it to build properties programmatically and then store them. For example, using code like this:

java.util.Properties props = new java.util.Properties();
props.setProperty("table.whereclause", "where id=100");
props.store(System.out, null);

This would output to System.out the properly escaped version.

In my case the output was:

#Mon Aug 12 13:50:56 EEST 2013
table.whereclause=where id\=100

As you can see, this is an easy way to generate content of .properties files that's guaranteed to be correct. And you can put as many properties as you want.

In my case, two leading '\\' working fine for me.

For example : if your word contains the '#' character (e.g. aa#100, you can escape it with two leading '\\'

   key= aa\\#100