Adding a meta tag into a freemarker template e.g. base login template.ftl, is quite easy. The meta property from theme.properties is parsed and added into the template header, e.g. like this:

 10     <#if properties.meta?has_content>
 11         <#list properties.meta?split(' ') as meta>
 12             <meta name="${meta?split('==')[0]}" content="${meta?split('==')[1]}"/>
 13         </#list>
 14     </#if>

Now this is great, but works only with simple meta tags e.g.
meta=Content-Type==text/html

But the issue I'm having is with more complex meta tags, because I assume due to parsing, this results in an error (due to whitespaces iinm)
meta=Content-Type==text/html; charset=UTF-8

How do you deal with special chars and empty spaces in the theme.properties? Any way to escape these?