This function is supposed to be purely cosmetic. It just cleans up the junk whitespace commonly left behind when coding. But it could cause a problem when someone expects some string they defined to stay the same value, and then use that function and all of a sudden they have a crazy bug that you wouldn't even know how to find.

The current behavior of IDLE's feature is standard, not a bug. The cpython respository does not currently accept .py, .c, or .rst files with any trailing whitespace. <pythondir>/tools/scripts/patchcheck.py strips trailing whitespace from all lines. Notepad++, a widely used multi-language Windows programmer's editor, does the same. I am aware of the potential surprise. If one wants multiline strings with embedded trailing whitespace, one should avoid trailing whitespace strippers or use Python's string concatenation feature. >>> s = ('space \n' 'tab\t\n' 'line3\n') >>> s 'space \ntab\t\nline3\n' I am revising the doc to make the rstring behavior clearer.