[Zope] removing newline character from returned python string

I have a python script that transforms the results of a zsql method into xml. The script builds the xml in a python string and returns that string as the scripts output. The problem I have is that the string contains a newline character (\n) which corrupts the xml. I made sure to strip the string before it's returned... XML = XML.strip() return XML ... but the output always contains the newline character. Does anyone have suggestions on how I could fix this? Thanks, Jon