Gradle uses wrong encoding (Latin-1) for property file

I try to read properties from a file with umlauts, this is my build.gradle:

task utf8test << {

    Properties props = new Properties()
    def propFile = new File("my.property")
    if (propFile.canRead()) {
        props.load(new FileInputStream(propFile))
        for (Map.Entry property in props) {
                println property.value
        }
    }
}

My property-file looks like (UTF-8 encoded):

challenge: ö

If i execute the task with: gradle utf8test The result looks like

:utf8test
ö

BUILD SUCCESSFUL

Total time: 0.877 secs

"ö" changes to "ö", which is easy to understand. "ö" as hexadecimal is c3b6 and c3 in latin-1 is à and b6 is ¶, but it is not what i expected.

Question: How can i configure gradle to read in properties as UTF-8 encoded

More Informations:

If i print out the propFiles content in gradle with:

println propFile.text

i receive "ö" as output, so the file is read in correctly and the output is encoded correctly by my shell.

Gradle-daemon runs with: -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

Executing gradle with -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8:gradle utf8test -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 does not help, nor does export GRADLE_OPTS="-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8" in bash, nor does adding systemProp.file.encoding=utf-8 to gradle.properties.

I was not able to find the documentation page for the Properties-Class in gradle, is there any option to configure the encoding?

Many thanks so far!

That's expected, and doesn't have much to do with gradle. The documentation of java.util.Properties (which has nothing to do with Gradle but is a standard class of the JDK) explicitely specifies that the standard encoding of properties file is ISO-8859-1. If you're the only one to read the file, and want it to contain UTF-8, then explicitely read it as UTF-8:

Properties props = new Properties()
def propFile = new File("my.property")
if (propFile.canRead()) {
    props.load(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(propFile), StandardCharsets.UTF_8));
    for (Map.Entry property in props) {
            println property.value
    }
}