Strip whitespace around node names?

[fedarko]

I was testing EMPress on a old Newick file I had lying around (representing a tree shown in this article: https://rachel53461.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/algorithm-for-drawing-trees), and I noticed something strange.

The Newick file (I think I just put this together manually when I originally read this article?) looks like this:

((a:1, (b:1, c:1)d:1)e:1, f:1, (g:1, (h:1, i:1, j:1, k:1, l:1)m:1)n:1)o:1;

Loading the tree in EMPress works as normal, but what is interesting is that searching for node f doesn't work. This is because the whitespace before f in the Newick file is actually being treated as part of this node's name, so in order to search for this node I had to type [space character goes here]f in the search bar.

Interestingly, in the selected node menu for this node, the node name is just listed as f (with no preceding whitespace). Not sure if this is an artifact of how the JS code works or an automatic thing being done by the DOM or something.

Anyway, long story short: it might be worth adding a step in EMPress' Python code that -- once a tree is obtained from the IOW library -- strips leading/trailing whitespace, and then continues with normal validity checks (looking for duplicate tip names, etc.) But I am not sure if this is a good way to handle this, or if whitespace in Newick is even a valid thing. I imagine this is a pretty rare corner-case, since most tree files are probably going to be computer-generated (and therefore probably won't have redundant spacing).