Matching Strings

[rshepard at nospam.appl-ecosys.com]

  I'm not sure how to change a string so that it matches another one.

  My application (using wxPython and SQLite3 via pysqlite2) needs to compare
a string selected from the database into a list of tuples with another
string selected in a display widget.

  An extract of the relevant code is:

    selName = self.polTree.GetItemText(selID)
    ...  
    for item in self.appData.polNat:
      print 'Item: ', item, '\n', 'selName: ', selName, '\n'
      if item == selName:
        print '***** ', self.appData.polNat[1]

  The last comparison and print statement never work because the strings are
presented this way:

	Item:  (u'ground water',) 
	selName:  ground water

  What do I need to do to 'Item' to strip the parentheses, unicode symbol,
single quotes, and comma? Do I want 'raw' output? If so, how do I specify
that in the line 'if item == selName:'?

TIA,

Rich