If you are ever building a multi-lingual application using flex then you will no doubt end up using resource bundles.

When building a resource bundle for a language like French, you need to ensure that the encoding of the resource properties file is set to UTF-8 when editing. Otherwise you will end up with a number of little square boxes appearing in your text where the french accents are supposed to be.

By default the resource properties files are set to ISO-8859-1. To alter this, right-click on the resources.properties file and change the text file encoding property to UTF-8. You will then need to go back and retype the text in the files.  Many thanks to Didier Burton for pointing this out to me.

Voila... no more square boxes!