Changelog - Version 5.7.8 (2026-05-21)

Version Information

• Updated version from 5.7.7 to 5.7.8
• Fix for the Stable bot: weather data from the WebSocket is now parsed reliably and no longer breaks on location names containing apostrophes

Bug Fixes

• Fixed WEATHER_DATA payload parsing failing on apostrophes in location names
  • The bot’s process_weather_websocket handler was using ast.literal_eval to parse the weather_data payload because the API had previously sent the data as a stringified Python dictionary (single-quoted, with mixed quoting on apostrophes).
  • Any payload containing a location like Saint John's, Coeur d'Alene, or O'Brien produced malformed quoting on the wire and crashed the parser, so the weather notice never made it to chat.
  • The bot now tries json.loads first and only falls back to ast.literal_eval for legacy payloads. New payloads from the API are clean JSON, so the apostrophe class of failures is gone.

Technical Details

• Root cause was that the WebSocket weather event was being constructed by passing a Python dict through urlencode, which calls str() on the dict and produces Python-literal syntax instead of JSON. The dual quoting around apostrophes ("Saint John's" vs 'Saint John\'s') varied based on the field contents, making any single-quote-replacement-then-json.loads strategy unreliable.
• Fixes implemented:
  • Added a tolerant parser to process_weather_websocket(): attempts json.loads(raw) first, and only falls back to ast.literal_eval(raw) if the JSON parse fails. Errors from both paths are logged via event_logger.error rather than crashing the handler.
  • The API was updated in the same release to send json.dumps(formatted_weather_data) so new payloads no longer require any fallback.

Thank you for your feedback and support!

As always, your feedback is appreciated. Please report any issues, bugs, or suggestions in the #ticket-info channel on our Discord server. You can also submit feedback and bug reports directly on our support website: https://support.botofthespecter.com/