BeautifulSoup removes trailing whitespace?

Apparently using Soup.text removes trailing whitespace for some reason. For example:

In [1]: from Beautiful开发者_如何学CSoup import BeautifulSoup as Soup

In [2]: print Soup('<a href=''>a  </a>').text+ 'a'
aa

Is this intended behaviour and is there any way to stop it happening?

Edit: the desired output is

a  a

Maybe it comes from the fact that trailing whitespaces are eliminated in HTML