I have an error where a Python dictionary doesn’t have a key that is absolutely present.

I have a function to_geojson which takes various parts of a geopandas dataframe and returns a dictionary with string keys:

to_geojson(gdf).keys()
=> dict_keys(['type', 'geometry', 'properties'])
[type(key) for key in to_geojson(gdf).keys()]
=> [<class 'str'>, <class 'str'>, <class 'str'>]

to_geojson(gdf)['geometry']
=> KeyError: 'geometry'

Converting the output of to_geojson to a JSON string and back also doesn’t work.

Aside from this, ‘geometry’ has a nested key ‘coordinates’. Again the types check out, but the behavior is again unbelievably strange:

for key in to_geojson(gdf).keys():
    if key1 == "geometry":
        to_geojson(gdf)[key1] # This doesn't blow up!
        for key2 in to_geojson(gdf)[key].keys():
            if key2 == "coordinates":
                coords = to_geojson(gdf)[str(key2)] # KeyError: 'coordinates'!!