Android 3.4+ file encoding error causing projects to fail in loading and file to become unreadable

Question

Ever since i upgraded to android studio 3.4 and going forth to 3.5.3 and i been experiencing projects that i used to work on earlier in the day suddenly fail to load and modules can't be read and opening any files .xml , .gradle all i see is the something like below:

I tried :

• resetting the encoding to UTF8 from android studio settings > editor
• invalidating the cache and restart
• delete the .idea folder and reloading project

Nothing works, unless i have a copy of the same project or have it on Github and clone it again and re open it.

Note: while the files look like the image you see in android studio, opening any of them in an editor like VScode shows the correct contents of the file

Anyone have a clue, because this is really frustrating

Answer 1

TL;DR

• disable Dart and flutter plugins in File > settings > plugins menu, reopen your project like you usually do.

Extra steps that could help:

1. clear cache
2. delete the .idea folder
3. delete all .iml files from you project as suggested by @Max Shwed

How i got there:

The issue mentioned above kept happening in a number of android projects old and new. before uninstalling AS an reinstall i thought i give it one last try, i cleared the cache, delted all the the .iml files manually along with the .idea folder.

After that i imported the project and let AS regenerate the deleted files, one weird thing happened is that my build.gralde file was looking totally different there was Dart code inside it and package import from dart, while the file was completely unaltered when opened in any text editor (thankfully AS didn't re-write the file) it was simply built differently in AS view.

Suspecting Dart plugin to be the problem since i have some demo Flutter apps i been working on , i disabled the Dart plugin and just re-opened my project and Voila everything looks fine and project built successfully and run.

Answer 2

i think it's flutter framework issue

but i have a solution that i tried and fixed this

just make right click in your distributed file -> local history -> show history -> and revert one step

it will get your original code without any formatting and wait for the next flutter plugins to update