I’ve been using frameworks for a number of years. So I expect a lot of things to happen “for free” in Django. One is whitespace removal. In Delicious we had a lot of data in our database with leading and trailing whitespace. On the frontend we moved to symfony (actually ysymfony) and that prevented a lot of this.
So I was quite surprised that this is not the case with Django. So I decided we could solve this at the form level, and released a ridiculously simple library. After some googling, I found that I was not the first to do this.
Feel free to use this, fork it, submit pull requests, etc. I suspect in the future we’ll handle other global form filtering - like stripping high order Unicode since MySQL is often not a fan.