AI Python Error: Debugging Gibberish Output

Okay, so picture this: It’s late, I’m feeling adventurous (and maybe a little too much coffee), and I decide to dip my toes into the wild world of AI-powered code generation. You know, those fancy tools that promise to write Python scripts for you with just a prompt. My grand idea? A simple script to log some daily thoughts and maybe a weather update. Easy peasy, right? Famous last words. I typed in my prompt, hit "generate," and out popped a Python script that looked… plausible. It had imports, functions, and what looked like file handling. I was feeling like a coding wizard, ready to automate my life. I ran it. Nothing exploded. Success! I eagerly opened the output file to check my brilliant first AI-generated log.

And then I saw it. Gibberish.

Not just a few random characters, but like, pages and pages of absolute nonsense. It looked like a printer from the 90s trying to send a fax after being submerged in a fizzy drink. My confidence deflated faster than a punctured inflatable sumo wrestler. What. Just. Happened.

TL;DR: My AI-generated Python script, meant to log thoughts and weather, ended up writing pure gibberish to a file. After a deep dive, I found the culprit wasn't the AI itself, but a misunderstanding of encoding and a misplaced variable. Debugging involved checking file modes, understanding character sets, and realizing that sometimes, the simplest things trip you up the most.

The "Oops" Moment: Gibberish Galore!

The script was supposed to be straightforward. It was supposed to:

Get the current date and time.

Fetch a simple weather summary (I was using a free, very basic API for this).

Write these two pieces of information to a text file named daily_log.txt.

Here’s a simplified (and much cleaner) version of what I thought the AI gave me:

import datetime
import requests
import os
def get_weather_data(api_key, location):
    # Placeholder for actual API call
    return {"temp": "25C", "description": "Sunny"}
def log_entry(message):
    filename = "daily_log.txt"
    with open(filename, "a", encoding="utf-8") as f:
        f.write(message + "\n")
def main():
    # API details
    my_api_key = "YOUR_FAKE_API_KEY" # Don't worry, this is fake!
    my_location = "Manila"
    # Get date and time
    now = datetime.datetime.now()
    timestamp = now.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
    # Get weather
    weather_info = get_weather_data(my_api_key, my_location)
    weather_desc = weather_info.get("description", "N/A")
    weather_temp = weather_info.get("temp", "N/A")
    weather_message = f"Weather: {weather_temp}, {weather_desc}"
    # Combine and log
    log_message = f"[{timestamp}] {weather_message}"
    log_entry(log_message)
    print("Log entry created successfully!")
if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

This looks innocent enough, right? The problem wasn't in the logic of what to log, but how it was being written. When I opened daily_log.txt, I was greeted with something like this:

☀️ [2023-10-27 23:59:59] Weather: 25°C, Sunny
：：： [2023-10-27 23:59:59] Weather: 25°C, Sunny
　　　 [2023-10-27 23:59:59] Weather: 25°C, Sunny

Okay, maybe not pages of gibberish, but definitely not the clean text I expected. Those weird symbols are usually a sign of encoding issues – the computer is trying to display characters that don't match the encoding it's using. It’s like trying to read a Filipino newspaper with a Japanese character set. Utter confusion!

Digging into the Encoding Abyss

My first thought was, "Is the AI broken?" But then I remembered the encoding="utf-8" in my open() call. UTF-8 is pretty standard and should handle most characters, including special symbols and emojis, without a hitch. So, if the encoding was specified, why the garbage?

This led me down a rabbit hole of file handling and character encodings. I started by double-checking how I was opening the file. The AI’s script (or what I perceived as the AI’s script, since I had tweaked it a bit) used "a" mode. This means "append," which is correct for adding new log entries. The encoding="utf-8" part was also there.

The issue wasn't necessarily with the AI’s generated code directly, but how I was interpreting and using it, combined with a subtle misunderstanding. I suspected the problem might be when the data was read back or displayed, not necessarily written. However, the file itself contained the corrupted characters.

I decided to simplify. What if I just wrote a simple string, without any API calls or complex formatting?

# Test script 2: Simple writing
with open("test_gibberish.txt", "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    f.write("Hello, world! Let's test this encoding: é à ö ü ñ")
print("Simple write test complete.")

I ran this, then opened test_gibberish.txt. It showed up perfectly fine! The "é à ö ü ñ" were all there, looking crisp and correct. This was confusing. The simple string worked, but the more complex log entry didn't.

Then I remembered a crucial detail: the get_weather_data function was a placeholder. In my actual test, I hadn't fully implemented it. The AI might have generated code that expected certain types of data back from an API, and when it got something unexpected (or perhaps nothing at all), it might have tried to encode or process it in a way that led to the corruption. Or, more likely, I had copied some example code that did involve special characters, and my simplified version above missed that nuance.

Let’