string/list comparison

[bruce]

hi...

i have the following piece of code that i'm testing... it should be
using/comparing two equal strings. apparently it doesn't. i've tried to do a
"strip" to remove pre/post whitespace.. but there appears to be something
else going on.

i suspect that there is some type of unicode going on. is there some way
that i can print out what's really in the string so i can know what to
remove...

in the test, the sstr/trstr should both be "Summer A" for some reason i'm
getting a len of 10 and 11 chars...

any thoughts/comments...

thanks

-bruce

#extract process from the class page
  print "section"
  f = urllib.urlopen(url)
  s = f.read()
  f.close()
  #print s
  # s contains HTML not XML text
  d = libxml2dom.parseString(s, html=1)

  #get the tr list
  tr1 = d.xpath(alltr)

  #get the sess list
  sess1 = d.xpath(sess)

  #build the tr list
  trlist = []
  for aaa in tr1:
     trlist.append(aaa.nodeValue)
     #print "aaa = ",aaa.nodeValue

  #build the course list
  sesslist = []
  for aaaa in sess1:
     sesslist.append(aaaa.nodeValue)
     #print "aaaa = ",aaaa.nodeValue


  print "sesstest = ",sesslist[0]
  print "sesstest2 = ",sesslist[1]
  print "trtest = ",trlist[3]


  sstr = sesslist[0]   <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< these should be the same
  trstr = trlist[3]    <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< "Summer A"

  sstr.strip(sstr)
  trstr.strip(trstr)

  print "slen = ",len(sstr)
  print "trlen = ",len(trstr)

  if sesslist[0] == trlist[3]:
   print "okkkkkk"
  sys.exit()