French accent characters in Flex

Just this past week we added support for the French language (fr_CA) to a Flex application we are building at work. Nothing complicated really, just had to make use of resource bundles as described in the Flex livedocs.

However we did notice that when running the Flex application, certain French characters that contain accents (ex.: é - ALT-130) were displaying as little empty boxes in the UI. Found the answer to this problem on this website. Basically the encoding for our french properties file was incorrect. It was using ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8.

To resolve this problem, in Eclipse, perform these steps:

1. Right-click on your french properties file and select "Properties"
2. Select "Resource" from the left side panel
3. Change the "Text file encoding" from the default to "Other" and select "UTF-8"