I have a plaintext php file in which the content has mysteriously 'dissappeared' The file is 32k and notepad registers 32000 ish characters. When I open in textpad, notepad etc there are loads of whitespace characters. when I open it in vi I see a whole screen of this ^@^@^@ When I opennin notepad++ I see NULNULNULNUL etc Changing encoding in notepad++ does nothing.
I was editing the file in netbeans IDE and have used this setup for a long time, nothing has changed. Encoding is ANSI I don't use any special characters as it is php. The only thing that happened was I accidently engaged Windoze different language when I was typing and it started typing e with accents etc. I did shift ctrl etc to change this until it typed normal characters again.
Clearly something has happened to corrupt this but the file size suggests content might still be there.
Does anyone have any suggestions? Is there even any content to recover or has it all been erased?
I have a backup but it is a little out of date so I will lose a fair whack of work if I can't recover this which naturally I don't want to do.
Thanks.
previous versions
of the file or may be the entire folder. (Backup before doing)