Why do tuples with only one element get converted to strings?
<p>In the below example I would expect all the elements to be tuples, why is a tuple converted to a string when it only contains a single string?</p>

<pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; a = [('a'), ('b'), ('c', 'd')]
&gt;&gt;&gt; a
['a', 'b', ('c', 'd')]
&gt;&gt;&gt; 
&gt;&gt;&gt; for elem in a:
...     print type(elem)
... 
&lt;type 'str'&gt;
&lt;type 'str'&gt;
&lt;type 'tuple'&gt;
</code></pre>
