cProfile saving data to file causes jumbles of characters

Question

I am using cProfile on a module named bot4CA.py so in the console I type:

python -m cProfile -o thing.txt bot4CA.py

After the module runs and exits, it creates a file named thing.txt and when I open it, there is some information there, and the rest is a jumble of characters instead of a neatly organized file of data which is what I want. Does any one know how to use cProfile and end up with neatly organized table of data like when using it normally on command line, except in a file? Here's an example of some of the data in the .txt file:

{(   s)   build\bdist.win32\egg\colorama\winterm.pyi'   t      reset_all(   i   i   gpàÂs% ?geOÙHÌœE?{(   s-   build\bdist.win32\egg\colorama\ansitowin32.pyi¥

What I really want is what happens when you invoke cProfile.run() which results in a neatly organized table printed showing the execution times of all the functions except instead of printed, saved in a file as this program is fairly large and runs a lot of functions.

Answer 1

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

import pstats
p = 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.

Answer 2

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_file
Welcome to the profile statistics browser.
prof.txt% sort cumtime
prof.txt% reverse
prof.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

Answer 3

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.txt
python -m cProfile bot4CA.py > thing.txt