"Use regular expressions for more advanced stripping than what the .strip method provides."

So I guess this brings me back to my original issue. I'm not looking for particularly advanced stripping. I just want to remove all whitespace and other non-printing characters. I personally can never think of a time when I wouldn't want this (especially with isspace). Maybe in some applications, the control characters are useful and shouldn't be stripped, but I would argue that _that_ is the more advanced use case for most people.

Thus strip and isspace are now unusable methods in Python for common use cases. This seems unfortunate.

I can understand the claims of feature creep. I even understand that having isspace compare itself against non-whitespace characters may seem counter-intuitive on its face. But certainly there must be a satisfactory remedy here.