cProfile saving data to file causes jumbles of characters

You should use the pstats module to parse this file and extract information in user-friendly format from it. For example:

import pstatsp = pstats.Stats('thing.txt')p.sort_stats('cumulative').print_stats(10)

It's all in the documentation, of course. Go over the "instant user's manual" in there, it explains everything.

to dump the stats driectly:

echo 'stats' | python3 -m pstats path/to/cprofile_output_file

pstats also has a shell

$ python3 -m pstats path/to/cprofile_output_file

within we can issue stats or sort commands like so:

$ python3 -m pstats path/to/cprofile_output_fileWelcome to the profile statistics browser.prof.txt% sort cumtimeprof.txt% reverseprof.txt% stats   Ordered by: standard name   ncalls  tottime  percall  cumtime  percall filename:lineno(function)        1    0.000    0.000    0.000    0.000 63:1(<module>)        1    0.000    0.000    0.000    0.000 {built-in method builtins.exec}        1    0.000    0.000    0.000    0.000 {built-in method builtins.print}        1    0.000    0.000    0.000    0.000 {method 'disable' of '_lsprof.Profiler' objects}prof.txt% ?Documented commands (type help <topic>):========================================EOF  add  callees  callers  help  quit  read  reverse  sort  stats  strip

a micro-feature I enjoyed here is I get to reverse the sort order natively <3

echo -e 'sort cumtime\nreverse\nstats' | python3 -m pstats path/to/cprofile_output_file

The other answers are more powerful and flexible, but if you just want to get a quick output, use > instead of -o. That will save the report in plain text format.

python -m cProfile myscript.py > cprofile.txtpython -m cProfile bot4CA.py > thing.txt