Remove whitespaces in XML string

Question

How can I remove the whitespaces and line breaks in an XML string in Python 2.6? I tried the following packages:

etree: This snippet keeps the original whitespaces:<

Answer 1

Whitespace is significant within an XML document. Using whitespace for indentation is a poor use of XML, as it introduces significant data where there really is none -- and sadly, this is the norm. Any programmatic approach you take to stripping out whitespace will be, at best, a guess - you need better knowledge of what the XML is conveying to properly remove whitespace, without stepping on some piece of data's toes.