First, Cheryl, thanks for taking this on!

I think one way to potentially simplify this whole situation about the whitespace for the prompt is to actually store the raw value that gets passed into EnvBuilder instead of the prompt as formatted for the activation scripts. I personally only want that initial value anyway and not the formatted version for the prompt for us in VS Code. Plus if we document that the value that we save in the pyvenv.cfg will be stripped then that should help with this.

Otherwise I say go with the repr as Steve suggested, but I would still like to have access to the unformatted value (and probably not bother setting it if a custom value isn't provided to facilitate relocating venvs).