title: Accessing unicoded keys with spaces in them in Python 2.7
body: <p>I am working on a project where I am trying to take Excel files (read in via <code>xlrd</code>) and geocode addresses in them.  For this, I am using a list of directories, with each directory entry a separate site.</p>
  
  <p>Something like <code>addressList[0]</code> will result in the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>{text:u'First name ': u'John',
   text:u'Site City': u'Indio',
   text:u'Site State': u'CA',
   text:u'Last name': u'Doe',
   text:u'Site Phone': u'760-555-1234',
   text:u'Site Zip': u'92201',
   text:u'Site Address1': u'1313 Mockingbird Lane',
   text:u'Site Name': u'Tyrell Industries',
   text:u'Hours': u'Mon-Fri 12:00-1:00',
   text:u'Affliation': u'Boys &amp; Girls Clubs of America'}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>(And I just realized in the spreadsheet, "affiliation" was spelled incorrectly. Meh.)</p>
  
  <p>Now, I know from looking around that <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13474957/spaces-in-python-dictionary-keys">keys in Python can have spaces in them</a>, and that this shouldn't be a problem. But entering <code>addressList[0]['Site Phone']</code> results in a KeyError. In fact, trying to get the value of the 'Hours' key results in a similar KeyError.</p>
  
  <p>Based on a <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1254454/fastest-way-to-convert-a-dicts-keys-values-from-unicode-to-str">question on Unicode keys</a>, I tried the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>STRING_DATA = dict([(str(k), v) for k, v in addressList[0].items()])
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Which resulted in a dictionary with entries like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>"text:u'Site Name'": u'Tyrell Industries',
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This is reasonably okay, except I'm now having to access the value via <code>STRING_DATA["text:u'Site Name'"]</code>, which seems like a pain.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a quicker/easier way to use the keys?</p>