With regard to the first paragraph, I would say that “this consideration is of non consequence,” because the computer can perform the operation in a few nanoseconds using a single regex.

With regard to the second one, however, there could be a bit more of a problem, because when you do go about designing the code to “change a couple things,” you will perhaps need to be extremely careful to design the algorithm to always change the right things and to do so consistently in all cases.

Nevertheless, each of these concerns are basically independent of one another, and therefore I would proceed in this course.   Removing the white space will allow you to use a regex efficiently to winnow out the lines-of-interest wheat among millions-of-lines of chaff, and that alone is enough.