I think this is not entirely safe: the note on [dict.items](http://docs.python.org/2/library/stdtypes.html#dict.items) mentions that the iteration order of a dictionaries contents (be it only keys, only values or both or whatever), albeit not random, is an implementation detail, so it might happen that the `_re_win32_incompat` lists `:` (no spaces) before ` : ` (spaces) which would break the replacement.