'|' character within Regex returns a tuple?

[pprod]

Hi,
Using the '|' character within a Regex is giving me an undesirable result that I have been unable to avoid. For example, consider a 2-page file with the following text in each page:

Page 1:
111A111 #red.

Page 2:
AAA1AAA #green.

for i in range(0,2):
    text = doc.getPage(i).extract_text()

    color_re = re.compile(r'#\w+\.')
    color = color_re.findall(text)
    print(color)

Output:
['red.']
['green.']

    pattern_re = re.compile(r'(\w+\d+\w+)|(\d+\w+\d+)')
        pattern = pattern_re.findall(text)
        print(pattern)

Output:
('', 'AAA1AAA')
('111A111', '')

If I do:

color =[item.strip('.') for item in color]

I get rid of '.' so, all is good.

But if I do:

pattern = [item.strip(' , ') for item in pattern]

I get the error:

Output:
AttributeError: 'tuple' object has no attribute 'strip'

Is there a way to avoid this error? I need to get rid of the spaces and commas in 'pattern'.
Thanks and apologies in advance if the question is not properly formulated. I'm a beginner.