I have been trying to write/parse xml file in python. The tags are very simple

<main>
   <data>
     abcdef
   </data>
</main>

I have written this xml using xml document writer from xml.dom.minidom.

How-ever when i try to parse this and try to fetch data-text value, i get 'abcdef' with spaces/carriage return/newline characters in beg and end. Does parsing does not take of indenting spaces? Following is the parsing snippet (ref from net)

dom = parseString(data)
clipTag = dom.getElementsByTagName('clipdata')[0].toxml()
clipData=clipTag.replace('<clipdata>','').replace('</clipdata>','')

Kindly suggest.