Strange thing with types

[TYR]

I'm doing some data normalisation, which involves data from a Web site
being extracted with BeautifulSoup, cleaned up with a regex, then
having the current year as returned by time()'s tm_year attribute
inserted, before the data is concatenated with string.join() and fed
to time.strptime().

Here's some code:
timeinput = re.split('[\s:-]', rawtime)
print timeinput #trace statement
print year #trace statement
t = timeinput.insert(2, year)
print t #trace statement
t1 = string.join(t, '')
timeobject = time.strptime(t1, "%d %b %Y %H %M")

year is a Unicode string; so is the data in rawtime (BeautifulSoup
gives you Unicode, dammit). And here's the output:

[u'29', u'May', u'01', u'00'] (OK, so the regex is working)
2008 (OK, so the year is a year)
None (...but what's this?)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "bothv2.py", line 71, in <module>
    t1 = string.join(t, '')
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/string.py", line 316, in join
    return sep.join(words)
TypeError