According to the git history 1a37656 bools have been trimmed since they were first added by @rsc. @rsc: What was the motivation for trimming bools? Was it convenience?

If the reasoning was convenience I think it makes sense for there to be consistency across types where whitespace has no meaning since consistency will result in less wrong assumptions, but I think if it was to be added for consistency it'd need to be added to unsigned ints and floats too.

The no error on an invalid integer isn't intuitive and I think it should be considered a bug if trimming isn't introduced.

Not to weigh on any side of the scales, I'd still point out a bit from my response to @md2perpe over there on the ML:

The question of whether the string " 266703" represents a valid
integer is hardly decidable in my opinion. For instance, would the
string "\v\v\v\n\n\n\t\t266703\n\n\n\v\v\v\v\t\x20\t" represent a valid
integer as well?

That is, while " 266703" looks innocent enough, though mildly annoying as it hints at sloppy
implementation of whatever generated that document, a string containing lots of "weird"
characters considered to be whitespace by Unicode (or Go's strings / bytes packages)
is, IMO, a bit less easily decidable to represent "valid" data.

@leighmcculloch Since we don't do our code review on Github it sometimes helps to look over there to get more background on a change. In this case, https://golang.org/cl/218050 . In this case it looks like the purpose of the CL was to accept more strings for bool values. It's not clear that anybody really considered the call to strings.TrimSpace in there.

Clearly we didn't think much of adding strings.TrimSpace in CL 218050 (which Michael Hoisie wrote and I reviewed), but it seems fine to apply strings.TrimSpace to all those numeric fields. Please make sure to update the docs and add a test. CLs welcome. Thanks.

If no one else is already on it I'd like to submit a CL to make the change. 🖐️

Change https://golang.org/cl/73891 mentions this issue: encoding/xml: ignore whitespace in values and attrs