title: Python file corrupted/wrongly enconded
body: <p>I'm a first-year college student facing an issue with Python. I've searched about everything on the Stack Overflow but nothing seems to work (or I don't understand them).</p>
  
  <p>Here's the problem: I was coding a stack composed of three files for a stochastic simulation. Today when I tried to open 2 of them, I got the following error:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/zejrv.png" alt="Code Error"></p>
  
  <p>After clicking ok this is what I got:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/GWCUf.png" alt="Corrupted file?"></p>
  
  <p>I noticed the encoding was marked as <strong>Latin-1</strong> (sometimes <strong>UTF-8 BOM</strong>) whereas on the working files it's <strong>UTF-8</strong></p>
  
  <p>At first I thought my USB got corrupted after plugging into a cheap USB Hub but then I tried with backups I had sent to someone and tried on 3 different PCs with the same results.</p>