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 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.