I did notice that these functions aren't called anywhere else but here: https://github.com/jameskunjoolee/freeseer/blob/437-rss_parser-tests/src/freeseer/framework/rss_parser.py#L146
Which does trim the whitespace.  I mainly added the strip so that I can test the output, but now that I'm mocking the output, should I even keep these changes at all?