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

A little clumsy solution without lxml :-)

data = """

        

"""

data3 = []
data2 = data.split('\n')
for x in data2:
    y = x.strip()
    if y: data3.append(y)
data4 = ''.join(data3)
data5 = data4.replace("  ","").replace("> <","><")

print data5

Output: