Properties are processed in terms of lines. There are two kinds of line, natural lines and logical lines. A natural line is defined as a line of characters that is terminated either by a set of line terminator characters (\n or \r or \r\n) or by the end of the stream. A natural line may be either a blank line, a comment line, or hold all or some of a key-element pair. A logical line holds all the data of a key-element pair, which may be spread out across several adjacent natural lines by escaping the line terminator sequence with a backslash character \. Note that a comment line cannot be extended in this manner; every natural line that is a comment must have its own comment indicator, as described below. Lines are read from input until the end of the stream is reached.
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As another example, the following three lines specify a single property:
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fruits apple, banana, pear, \
cantaloupe, watermelon, \
kiwi, mango
The key is "fruits" and the associated element is:
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"apple, banana, pear, cantaloupe, watermelon, kiwi, mango"
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Note that a space appears before each \ so that a space will appear after each comma in the final result; the \, line terminator, and leading white space on the continuation line are merely discarded and are not replaced by one or more other characters.??
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from : http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/Properties.html
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