To all, I use SketchUP Pro 2014 for my self employed business, so you can imagine my horror when after working on a file for about a solid week or more it popped up a message this morning saying:- ** UNEXPECTED FILE FORMAT ** There is no where to go after this message, even the .skb file after r…

I’ll reach out to the developer of Layers Panel and notify him about the bug. Keep an eye out for an update of the extension. Until then I’d disable it to be sure you don’t get more trouble.

Clayton, I sent it as a private message in this forum. You should see it under Messages on your profile page.

Hi Bugra, Still getting use to where all things reside on this forum, but I did get the recovered file o.k. straight after my e-mail to you. Have been working on the recovered file since this morning & confirm all is o.k; thanks again for all your help, has saved me a lot of potential grief from t…

Hi guys, I finally have got back from a trip, and have time to look at this. Could you give me some infos on what you found? What makes you think this was caused by Layers Panel? Did you find an attribute which name indicates it’s from LP, with an empty key? In that case, what was the attribute’s…

Hi @jiminybillybob , Yes, a Page had a dictionary attached to it with a name jbb_layerpanel something. I don’t remember the exact name. Does that sound about right? This dictionary had an empty key in it. Thanks for looking into it.

If you have time, could you look it up? Having the name and value would be really helpfull to understand why LP created an empty key in the first place. In the meantime, I modified it to validate every key, and will update soon.

[image] jiminybillybob: LP created an empty key in the first place. nil values would also evaluate to an empty string. So if the key was computed somehow you might have ended up with nil as a result of a failed function.

I published a fixed version, you guys just need to validate it :wink:

[image] tt_su: nil values would also evaluate to an empty string. So if the key was computed somehow you might have ended up with nil as a result of a failed function. I remember that the DC extension used to do that, or perhaps created a dictionary named nil. Was that fixed ?

The Dreaded - Unexpected file format

Technical Problems SketchUp

tt_su September 19, 2014, 6:05am 17

We’ll keep eye out in the EW moderation and fast track this one.

Sketchup Pro 2018 - Unexpected file format

Topic		Replies	Views
[error unexpected file format] SketchUp unexpectedfileformat	298	23034	March 3, 2026
Unexpected File Format - Help Please! recover please SketchUp sketchup , bug , components	140	10184	May 23, 2025
[Unexpected file format] After normal save Pro unexpectedfileformat	76	4023	October 11, 2023
Unexpected file format and bug splat when opening skp file Pro bug	142	8049	February 21, 2025
Unexpected File Format after saving and reopening a .skp file Pro unexpectedfileformat	260	26406	June 4, 2025

The Dreaded - Unexpected file format

Related topics