Question

I know you can have spaces in Python dictionary keys, but is that considered bad programming? I couldn’t find anything in the PEPs about this.

Edit for clarification:
On a project I’m doing, I’m working on something that parses the scoreboard output from Apache’s mod_status (see example output below.) I’m just trying to figure out the best practice. Should I end up with this:

workers = {'W': 1,
           '_': 9,
           ...}

or this:

workers = {'Sending Reply': 1,
           'Waiting for Connection': 9,
           ...}

Example mod_status output:

_....___W____._.................................................
................................................................
................................................................
................................................................
Scoreboard Key:
"_" Waiting for Connection, "S" Starting up, "R" Reading Request,
"W" Sending Reply, "K" Keepalive (read), "D" DNS Lookup,
"C" Closing connection, "L" Logging, "G" Gracefully finishing,
"I" Idle cleanup of worker, "." Open slot with no current process

Answer 1

You can use tools like pylint to check whether your code is PEP8 compatible or not :

so I tried something like :

M_D1 = {" foo bar ":1, " a bc":2, " ":3}

and pylint gave me 10/10 rating, so I guess it has no issues with the spaces used in keys.