Question VaM not recognising vars despite being in the addon folder

[BabbyCrow]

Pretty much the title. I've downloaded and added some vars (mainly looks) to the addonspackages folder and when I tried to load the first one, the hair was missing from the model. I looked at the error log to identify the var that it was missing and found it online. When I added that var to the folder, it was already there. I tried to load the look again but still missing the hair.

Now I have seen another thread on here which had the same issue as me and a reply stated that it was due to a broken var/var with chinese characters when I don't have the correct language pack.
My question is, how do I fix this? Is there a way to scan var files to find broken ones? Apologies if this is a relatively simple fix, I'm very beginner with using VaM and a lot of the terminology is lost on me.

Thanks

 

[atani]

Don't know if there's a tool to scan for either corrupted files or chinese characters inside VARs, but what you can is find the recent ones you added, move them out of AddonPackages, and see if it's back to normal. If so, then the problem VAR(s) is/are in that group.

To know more about what a VAR is:

anatomy of a VAR - Guides -

This guide means to show what makes a VAR a VAR A VAR is the prefered way to share content between VaM users, with the Hub hosting thousands of them as I write this guide. Yet, this file only exists from VaM version 1.20, if not mistaken, and...

hub.virtamate.com

 

[BabbyCrow]

Thank you Atani, I will do that first.

 

[SlimerJSpud]

Open each suspect var with 7zip. It's free. If 7zip throws an error, the var is corrupt. Vam will sometimes download an html document with an error message instead of the actual var if that var has been removed from the hub.