Do I use a properties file or just flat file to store a list of strings in JSP?

Question

I have a config.properties file which my JSP page uses to get configurations from. I need to create a whitelist, which just contains strings. Since property files are like key value pairs do I need to have another whitelist.txt or something? or can I specify an array of items in properties file itself?

Answer 1

Usually in this cases I use a simple .txt file and read it with commons-io or guava:

InputStream is = getClass().getResourceAsStream("/wordlist.txt"); //class-path relative
List<String> words = CharStreams.readLines(new InputStreamReader(is, "UTF-8"));