Find an element in a list of tuples
If you just want the first number to match you can do it like this:
[item for item in a if item[0] == 1]
If you are just searching for tuples with 1 in them:
[item for item in a if 1 in item]
There is actually a clever way to do this that is useful for any list of tuples where the size of each tuple is 2: you can convert your list into a single dictionary.
For example,
test = [("hi", 1), ("there", 2)]
test = dict(test)
print test["hi"] # prints 1