Or '{}'.format(foo). Personally, I have never faced this issue as:

1. I know/control the input while string formatting.

2 String-formatting tuple comes up rarely.

I format tuples for debugging on a regular basis, but tend to just wrap every arg to the format string in repr, so this never comes up.

This won't solve the immediate problem, but if you use "%r" instead of "%s", python will do the repr() for you.