The problem

The whitespace inside the HTML contents makes some functional tests harder than
they should be. Consider that you want to check the contents the following
element:

<p>
    Lorem ipsum
</p>

This test will fail:

$this->assertEquals(
    'Lorem ipsum',
    $crawler->filter('p')->first()->text()
);

You can obviously apply the trim() function, but this solution feels
unnatural:

$this->assertEquals(
    'Lorem ipsum',
    trim($crawler->filter('p')->first()->text())
);

The problem is worse when dealing with spaces and newlines:

<p>
    Lorem ipsum
    dolor sit
    amet
</p>

This solution no longer works:

$this->assertEquals(
    'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet',
    trim($crawler->filter('p')->first()->text())
);

The solution

DomCrawler component could add two new methods called trim() and flatten().
The first one is equivalent to the PHP's trim() function:

<p>
    Lorem ipsum
</p>

$this->assertEquals(
    'Lorem ipsum',
    $crawler->filter('p')->first()->text()->trim()
);

The second one would also remove new lines and trim two or more spaces between
lines:

<p>
    Lorem ipsum
    dolor sit
    amet
</p>

$this->assertEquals(
    'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet',
    $crawler->filter('p')->first()->text()->flatten()
);

My questions: is it worth it adding these two helper methods? Should I instead
create better tests? Can you think of a better solution to solve this problem?