I've just discovered that Django doesn't automatically strip out extra whitespace from form field inputs, and I think I understand the rationale ('frameworks shouldn't be altering user input'). I think I know how to remove the excess whitespace using python's re: #data = re.sub('\A\s+|\s+\Z', '', data) data = data.strip() data = re.sub('\s+', ' ', data) The question is where should I do this? Presumably this should happen in one of the form's clean stages, but which one? Ideally, I would like to clean all my fields of extra whitespace. If it should be done in the clean_field() method, that would mean I would have to have a lot of clean_field() methods that basically do the same thing, which seems like a lot of repetition. If not the form's cleaning stages, then perhaps in the model that the form is based on? Thanks for your help! W.