Could one of the drools developers look at JBRULES-3633 and the pull request in there? It would help me a lot if this patch could be applied. Please let me know if there is any problem with this patch, I will improve it as needed. We have been using a patched version for a while here without problems. The issue allows users to specify the character encoding to be used to read a rule file when setting up your knowledge base using spring configuration. Thanks, Joachim