"Extracting" a dictionary

[Daniel Klein]

Hello,

I'm quite new to Python, and since a not-so-superficial look into the 
docs didn't answer my question (although it still feels quite basic), I 
decided to turn to this place:

Is there a way to 'extract' a dictionary into the current namespace? 
That is, if you have
{'foo' : 23, 'bar' : 42}
you would get a variable foo with value 23 and a variable bar with value 
42? Such a function would of course only work on string keys and would 
probably have to check that, but still, it sounds practical enough that 
surely someone else thought of it before.

Daniel