Deleting entire columns and whitespace in .xml file - python-3.x

Question

Working with an xml file that contains excess whitespace and empty columns that I need to delete. So far, I've been able to delete specific node objects and/or elements of a node. I've been told previously that with xml files, you can't necessarily pinpoint or target whitespace in the file, but rather, you must replace it. How would I go about that?
Listed below is my code to remove either an entire node or a specific element within a node object. For example sake, let's assume we are using the following document:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html#modifying-an-xml-file
I'm using elementtree, not panda or dom.
# To remove an entire node and all of its elements
# for country in root.findall('country'):
# using root.findall() to avoid removal during traversal
# description = country.find('description').text
# if description == " Yurr ":
# root.remove(country)
# To remove a specific element or node within
# a node
for country in root.findall('country'):
description_node = country.find('description')
# This will remove the specific node
# 'description' in the .xml file.
if description_node.text == 'Liechtenstein has a lot of flowers.':
country.remove(description_node)
tree.write('SampleData.xml')

Answer 1

In XSLT 3.0,
<xsl:transform version="3.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>
<xsl:output method="xml" indent="no"/>
<xsl:mode on-no-match="shallow-copy"/>
<xsl:template match="year"/>
</xsl:transform>
will strip all indentation whitespace and remove elements named year. Is that what you're after?