After the full completion of my task in Adobe Illustrator, it says that the file is corrupted. Even with the latest version, the error occurs with the message “An Unknown Error Has Occurred”.
Bummer. Here’s hoping you did some incremental saves so you’re not having to recreate all of the work.
Happened to me today.
Managed to package the file which gave me a saved file.
Then restarted illustrator and it all worked fine.
Sometimes you can Place the file into a new doc too. Sometimes
Long ago, Illustrator files were simple enough to open in a text editor and make fixes to the code. Those days are long gone, though.
Whaaaattt 
I want this!
Yeh but you have to be able to save it.
No you don’t
I didn’t know if they were getting the error message on opening or saving. I guess i didn’t read it closely enough.
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In Inkscape you can still do this. The files are in .SVG format.
You can save SVG from Illustrator.
I used to handcode EPS files back in the day.
SVG is just code.
You can still open an AI file and make changes to it.
It’s no big deal.
The default setting in Illustrator now is to compress the code. I don’t know anyone who can directly edit compressed code.
Saved as an Illustrator file, the image above took 10,573 lines of code from which I grabbed a small screen capture, below, after opening in BBEdit.
Saved as an SGV, the file took 34 lines of code, which can be edited, and is a whole lot more like the simple PostScript from the first two or three versions of Illustrator back in the 1980s that I was referring to.
What if you save it as uncompressed?
Oh I see I typed AI file … meant SVG
Yeah, if it’s saved as SVG, it’s fairly straightforward. Unfortunately, SVG can’t handle more complicated Illustrator features. It’s sort of amazing that a 10,573-line Illustrator file can be reduced down to 34 lines when saved as SVG. I have little idea what those extra 10,539 lines of bloated Illustrator code do.
I’m not especially familiar with InkScape (that @PJMiller mentioned). I’ve seen some reasonably complicated graphics supposedly built in InkScape, so I don’t know how it manages to save everything into an SVG file.
Who knows it’s been a lifetime since I tinkers with code. Remember distinctly having to edit ps files going to an image setter. But cannot remember what it was it what I was doing. Important enough to come in on Saturdays, that’s for sure.