I've uploaded a new Python library jprops to GitHub. It reads and writes Java's .properties file format.

We were using pyjavaproperties at work, but ran into a few limitations. One of our developers had patched it to be able to read from a StringIO object instead of a file object. I had also encountered an issue where it has extended the standard property parsing to interpolate patterns like {var} to expand the value of var as a reference to another property. This interfered with some of our properties files that use ${var} as a pattern recognized by our configuration system.

Since pyjavaproperties was also missing some other features like unicode support I decided to go ahead and read over the the Java documentation of the file format and build a new cleanroom implementation. I have a decent set of unit tests and I think this implementation should cover all of the features documented in the spec. It has full support for reading and writing unicode values, though it it will return Python str objects by default when your key or value contains only ASCII. This was more convenient, but I may revisit that to always return unicode or have a switch for that behavior.

So, if you need to work with Java .properties files from Python, just pip install jprops and check out the docs. If it's missing something let me know.