Python gotchas: keywords and unicode strings

[Alan Conway <ac...@redhat.com>]

In case anyone else would be surprised by this:

Python will not allow unicode strings as keys for parameter passing
purposes:

>>> def f(a=1, b=2): print a, b
... 
>>> f(**{"a":1, "b":2}) 
1 2
>>> f(**{u"a":1, "b":2}) #  u"a" is unicode
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: f() keywords must be strings


The qpid decoder returns unicode strings, you need to str() them if you
want to use them for keyword args.