A few problems with apply()

[Ben Leslie]

I am having a couple of problems using apply.

I have an object which "looks" like a dictionary
with unicode strings as keys. (By looks like I mean
the object implement the mapping protocol, specifically
it is the AttributesImpl object in the xml library.)

This firstly fails with:

TypeError: apply() arg 3 expected dictionary, found instance

Obviously apply needs a real dictionary. Firstly, is this the
correct behaviour? Is there any good reason apply shouldn't
handle this?

This can trivially be got around with a simple loop to copy
the data from the object into a real dictionary.

After doing this I then got the following error:

TypeError: __init__() keywords must be strings

This is obviously because these are unicode strings, not
ascii strings. This can obviously be fixed with:

k.encode('ascii').

My question again is there a good reason the apply() function
can't handler unicode strings. (Actually I think the problem
is further down in PyEval_EvalCodeEx in ceval.c)

Thanks in advance,

Benno