Unlike other types of resource bundle, you don't subclass PropertyResourceBundle. Instead, you supply properties files containing the resource data. ResourceBundle.getBundle will automatically look for the appropriate properties file and create a PropertyResourceBundle that refers to it. See ResourceBundle.getBundle for a complete description of the search and instantiation strategy.

The following example shows a member of a resource bundle family with the base name "MyResources". The text defines the bundle "MyResources_de", the German member of the bundle family. This member is based on PropertyResourceBundle, and the text therefore is the content of the file "MyResources_de.properties" (a related example shows how you can add bundles to this family that are implemented as subclasses of ListResourceBundle). The keys in this example are of the form "s1" etc. The actual keys are entirely up to your choice, so long as they are the same as the keys you use in your program to retrieve the objects from the bundle. Keys are case-sensitive.

 # MessageFormat pattern
 s1=Die Platte \"{1}\" enthält {0}.

 # location of {0} in pattern
 s2=1

 # sample disk name
 s3=Meine Platte

 # first ChoiceFormat choice
 s4=keine Dateien

 # second ChoiceFormat choice
 s5=eine Datei

 # third ChoiceFormat choice
 s6={0,number} Dateien

 # sample date
 s7=3. März 1996
 

Note: PropertyResourceBundle can be constructed either from an InputStream or a Reader, which represents a property file. Constructing a PropertyResourceBundle instance from an InputStream requires that the input stream be encoded in ISO-8859-1. In that case, characters that cannot be represented in ISO-8859-1 encoding must be represented by Unicode Escapes, whereas the other constructor which takes a Reader does not have that limitation.