Somehow, strange characters do appear sometime in a modded eqp file I use, please see the pic. They look more like something I'd expect in a binary file, though I'm not a programmer so I could be wrong.
So far I have found no clear pattern when or where they appear, but in the worst case they can cause serious problems, even that a unit entry becomes unusable. I can edit those things out, but sometimes I find them again somewhere later in the same eqp file. In the case shown in the pic I didn't even touch most of those Italian unit entries (except changing the name to Bersaglieri), all edits were on different units.
Has anybody ever encountered something similar and knows what's going on or how to avoid this?
The only programs I use to edit the equipment are the unit editor found here and Programmer's Notepad (from where the pic is). I do changes quite often, so deactivate/activate this file using GME often too. Could this play a role here? I also do virus scans regularly. In short any help or insight about this would be greatly appreciated.
I have to check USMC again if there's anything like that in there too.
..if you would not make excel call the pzdats by default this problem would not occur..it has to do with the internal excel text checking and conversion tool..if excel is forced to open these files it will use a default profile which, with certain files, will screw the format totally and once screwed its not even possible to revert back as the spaces and tabs got mixed up and Excel has no reference anymore what was what...the problem with these textfiles is that a space can be a tab or not...once screwed the internal formatting (which includes the references if space=space or space=tab) the file is almost lost...
...In my initial experiments with the game engine I edited the nations file quite a few times and never ran into any issue...