Repository: Significant-Gravitas/AutoGPT
Pull request: Fix multi-byte character handling in `read_file`
### Background
Related to issue #232 - Multi-byte character handling
User reports UTF files not being read. Some files may be UTF-8 but have a BOM marker which Python can see as invalid, or may not be UTF-8 at all.

### Changes
The read_file command has been updated to detect the file encoding, then use the detected encoding to provide more reliable reading of files. The change requires the addition of the chardet dependency. It has been added to requirements.txt

### Documentation
Change is minor with what I believe to be obvious intent when viewing the code.

### Test Plan
Tested by making agent create a file by output redirect from PowerShell (which includes BOM markers, and previously failed read.) Files now correctly read.

### PR Quality Checklist
- [X] My pull request is atomic and focuses on a single change.
- [X] I have thoroughly tested my changes with multiple different prompts.
- [X] I have considered potential risks and mitigations for my changes.
- [X] I have documented my changes clearly and comprehensively.
- [X] I have not snuck in any "extra" small tweaks changes

Unfamiliar with generating test cases on a project of this scale. Would rather not horribly break things.


Problem statement:
Multi-byte character handling
It appears that Auto-GPT is not working well with other character encodings. I am trying to use it on information written in Portuguese (Brazilian Portuguese) and sometimes it complains about "string indices must be integers" - I believe it is because of characters with accents (as in comunicação, for example).

It would be nice to be able to change all interactions to another language more easily than to search and change them throughout all the code.

Hints from issue discussion:
@albertodesouza

I completely agree with you, and I'm also experiencing this issue when working with character encodings in languages like Portuguese. It's crucial for Auto-GPT to handle accented characters properly, as it affects the user experience. Having an easier way to switch between languages throughout the entire code would be a valuable improvement.

Let's hope for a solution to this problem soon.
Related: #1841

Commit message: Merge branch 'master' into detect-file-encoding-3158

Patch to review:
diff --git a/autogpt/commands/file_operations.py b/autogpt/commands/file_operations.py
index 05f060887003..d66b3fd1213e 100644
--- a/autogpt/commands/file_operations.py
+++ b/autogpt/commands/file_operations.py
@@ -5,6 +5,7 @@
 import os.path
 from typing import Generator
 
+import chardet
 import requests
 from colorama import Back, Fore
 from requests.adapters import HTTPAdapter, Retry
@@ -86,7 +87,10 @@ def read_file(filename: str) -> str:
         str: The contents of the file
     """
     try:
-        with open(filename, "r", encoding="utf-8") as f:
+        with open(filename, "rb") as f:
+            raw_data = f.read()
+            encoding = chardet.detect(raw_data)["encoding"]
+        with open(filename, "r", encoding=encoding) as f:
             content = f.read()
         return content
     except Exception as e:
diff --git a/requirements.txt b/requirements.txt
index 98530511314c..065f9753f6f5 100644
--- a/requirements.txt
+++ b/requirements.txt
@@ -21,6 +21,7 @@ webdriver-manager
 jsonschema
 tweepy
 click
+chardet>=5.1.0
 spacy>=3.0.0,<4.0.0
 en-core-web-sm @ https://github.com/explosion/spacy-models/releases/download/en_core_web_sm-3.5.0/en_core_web_sm-3.5.0-py3-none-any.whl
 


Code review comments:
diff_hunk: @@ -21,6 +21,7 @@ webdriver-manager
 jsonschema
 tweepy
 click
+chardet>=5.1.0
path: requirements.txt
text: @user1:
Please use `charset-normalizer` instead