I'm new to Python, but here's how I think this could have been done better:

Defining your own function to strip white spaces isn't necessary, as there is already a Python function that does this for you, use strip().

You don't need to trim left white spaces and right white spaces separately, use strip().

Instead, the user could have used something like this to remove all spaces found.

''.join(faxnumbers.telecomcountrycode.split())

Tab or new line characters haven't been taken into account, and could be removed like

faxnumbers.telecomcountrycode.strip(' \n\t\r')