Extracting the CIGAR string from a BAM via Python?
If you really do just want the cigar string then it's read.cigarstring. However, I'm not sure what you're trying to gain with the cigar package from Brent. Unless you want to get the string with the masking changed then the tuple you get from pysam is the same as what you get from cigar (with the exception of the numeric operations instead of character operations).