I have an external file that I load into a Properties step however one of the values contains special characters so instead of ÷Ã-ÕÔÓÒÑÃ?Ã?ÃŽÃ?ÌËÊÉÈ,‰ˆ‡…ER|@&><<> I get most of the ...
Is the file encoded in UTF-8? then you may try adding '-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8' in JAVA_OPTS of testrunner/soapui/ bat/sh files or other script whatever you are invoking. Hope this helps.