hstore provides objects that act just like ordinary dicts except they are backed by Postgresql hstores.
Use like this:
>>> import hstore
>>> d = hstore.open('postgresql://user@localhost/hstore_test', 'mydata')
>>> d['foo'] = 'bar'
>>> d.close() # written to DB
>>> d = hstore.open('postgresql://user@localhost/hstore_test', 'mydata')
>>> print d['foo']
barKeys and values are UTF-8 strings. As a convenience, you may use Unicode keys and values, but these are converted and stored as UTF-8 strings and values will be returned as such:
>>> d['unicode'] = u'日本語'
>>> isinstance(d['unicode'], str)
True
>>> d['unicode'] == u'日本語'.encode('utf-8')
True