Will donate if you can help!
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Hello, I’m not rich but if you can help me I’m willing to donate enough to buy a 12 pack of brew. I know you put time into this and I respect that. So lets move on.
We build arcade cabinets in my shop class (I am an inner-city high school algebra / wood shop teacher) and its also a hobby. Recently I bought a hard drive with tons of arcade games and artwork on it. Most of the databases were done in notepad++ which I have not come across before. I tried to activate a game by adding its title to simple data base and screwed up a simple file.
If I open a database with (edit with Notepad++) I can alter it most times then save it and its all good. A few times I did something wrong and the list of games became a solid paragraph all in black, before they were in red and blue. I have pics if needed.
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I should mention that I edited the file and there was some lag when i closed it and like a dumb ass I clicked my mouse a bunch of times in the center of the screen and when the computer caught up I agreed to a bunch of pop up windows all within a few seconds:( Before this all my files looked to be in notepad++ format but I had not downloaded it yet. Under properties for all my databases it is stated that they are to open with explorer but they show up in notepad++ style.
My guess is that I agreed to always change a file with this name somehow. I would just change the name but a bunch of pathways lead to this file.
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First thing, to avoid further loss, either backup the material or work on copy of the files.
There are no Notepad++ databases or file formats. Notepad++ edits simple text files. Its power comes from advanced editing tools and its ability to automatically syntax highlight (e.g. red and blue) by identifying the file purpose. But the files themselves are just text, a long sequence of letters/symbols with newline indicators.
Syntax highlighting is based on the file extension but you can override it from the language menu.
Another problem is with encoding, how text symbols are stored on disk. This may cause issues with files that contain non-English/standard symbols.What extension does the files you work with have?
When you open an undamaged file, what does the status line at the bottom says? ANSI? UTF-8? UCS-2? Other? -
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I open a undamaged file (properties says opens with explore, all my files say this) the text is black, red and has tons of < and / between all words. It also looks like a column list
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If I open it with notepad++ the texts looks the same but it is blue and black now
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If I open a damaged or a file I screwed up all text is black, in one long sentence, and all the < and / are gone
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If I open a file normal it looks like notepad++ (red and black text) but their is nothing at the bottom.
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If I open damaged or undamaged file with notepad++ the following is at the bottom:
eXtensible Language file Windows (CRLF) UTF-8 INS
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The UTF-8 is good news, you will likely not have encoding problems.
I assume it is eXtensibleMarkupLanguage, with XML extension.
These files are pretty difficult to read and edit by humans. They have several internal rules that need to be maintained and mainly used by applications.
The key rule is that every part of the file looks like
<some tags>information</some tag>
Where </some tag> indicates the closure of the section.
Butinformationwill likely contain additional tags like <sub_tag> other information </sub_tag>.Can’t tell what happened to the damaged files and whether they can be fixed.
You may post the first 300 chars of the damaged file. Maybe someone could guess to reverse the damage.
If its just a list of games perhaps you may start by finding a similar file within the disk and do some guesswork to reconstruct a proper list of 1 game.
Can’t you ask for help from whoever sold you that disk? -
Well I got it fixed. I had the person who wrote the file send me a replacement and it works fine. I will donate on the first when i get paid for the use of the software and the help. Thankyou everyone
