stripping punctuation from tuples

[Louis Luangkesorn]

How do you strip the punctuation from tuples?  In particular, say I have
a tuple a[10] (which happened to come from a not very well designed
database)

>>> a[10]
('Alan Tsang',)

How do I get something to say 'Alan Tsang'  with out the parens or the
','

Or, what I'm really trying to do is make this so
>>>b = breakname(a[10])
>>>b[0], b[1]

'Alan','Tsang'

I've tried to do:
>>> d = split(str(a[0]))
>>> d
["('Aaron", "Fan',)"]
>>> d[0]
"('Aaron"
>>> d[1]
"Fan',)"

But that is not quite what I want.
Many thanks.
Louis
--
K Louis Luangkesorn
lluang at northwestern.edu  http://pubweb.nwu.edu/~kll560  PGP:0xF3E2D362

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