A Trailing Space in .env Key Names Can Silently Break Credential Loading

A developer discovered that a space before the equals sign in a .env file causes custom environment variable parsers to load credentials under the wrong key name, with a trailing space appended. Because the rest of the codebase looks up variables without that trailing space, the correct credential is never found, yet no error or warning is raised. The bug was uncovered while comparing four near-identical hand-rolled load_env() functions across the same Python project, none of which stripped whitespace from the key side of the assignment. On machines where an older token already exists in the environment, scripts appear to run normally while silently ignoring any updated credential in the .env file. The fix is straightforward — applying strip() to the parsed key as well as the value — but the silent failure mode makes the bug particularly difficult to detect.