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.
