Can't recognise characters

I am writing a script to help me rename some files and the font changed seemingly randomly to characters that I don't recognise. I can't undo it using ctr+Z or the undo button. has anyone seen this problem before? Here's a seciton of my code, it all seems to look similar to this:

¿Ž³­AŽ.³s7höG>cWõ�àøú‡¿yîÇÓãç¿jqì”?ïqèq´µqŽ9õD‚�ž:‘ØpbÏó“&,ÍΟcJ)A×><s]÷œßä…÷_øbÕ½7ó+"„‚ü(Â3ÙB6]ˆ#$OA_ø$ÕZ

Font setting are set to default

Many thanks

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Several possibilities:

1. You somehow managed to convince MATLAB to save a .mlx (Live Script) file with a .m file name
2. You save()'d a file naming a .m file instead of a .mat file
3. You somehow managed to convince MATLAB to use matFile() with a .m file name instead of a .mat file
4. You used fopen()/fwrite()/fclose() to overwrite the .m file
5. You somehow managed to convince MATLAB to save a .slx (Simulink model) with a .m file name
6. You somehow managed to convince MATLAB to save a .xls or .xlsx to a .m file name.

Change of character encoding would not give you a result like that.

If you can attach such a file, we might possibly be able to figure out ended up stored in it.

It is likely that your .m file is gone and can only be recovered if you have a backup. Look to see if you have a .asv (autosave) file, or a .m~ (MacOS or Linux) file.