Do File Erased - The document is not encoded in UTF-8!

[Jeremy CELSE]

Dear all,
Hope you are all fine and safe.
I have a big problem with my do file I was working on the last two weeks.
I tried this morning to open the do file, and a prompt message appeared 'The document is not encoded in UTF-8!" and asking me to encode (multiple option list). Whatever my choice my do file is either blanked (if I choose encode, I see the following line: "<stata_dta><header><release>118</release><byteorder>LSF</byteorder><K> "or filled with squares... see below picture
Can someone help me recover my dofile?

Best

J

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

What you are viewing is not a do file but a dta file — a Stata dataset. Hopefully you didn’t overwrite your do file with your dataset.

I’m sympathetic to your loss as I once wrote a program that accidentally did the same thing, overwriting my do file because I didn’t use the correct path for my dataset. Unless you have some kind of automated backup, you may be out of luck.