grep/ag/etc results buffer: how to strip leading whitespace?

Question

I'm using ag.el as a front-end for the ag search utility. The results are displayed in a compilation buffer in the form <file>:<line>:<column>:<matching-text>. The matching-text includes leading-whitespace, and this makes the results harder to scan visually, in my opinion.

I dug around in the bowels of compile.el and ag.el hoping to find a way to strip the leading whitespace, but came up empty. Is there a way to accomplish this?

An example of search results in Emacs:

The same results in Vim (note the stripped whitespace):

Answer 1

Kudos to @wvxvw for pointing me in the right direction. I was able to normalize the whitespace by advising ag-filter, which ag adds to compilation-filter-hook.

(defun ivan/filter-whitespace (prefix-pattern)
  (save-excursion
    (forward-line 0)
    (let ((end (point)) beg)
      (goto-char compilation-filter-start)
      (forward-line 0)
      (setq beg (point))
      (when (< (point) end)
        (setq end (copy-marker end))

        ;; normalize whitespace between prefix-pattern and rest of line
        (while (re-search-forward prefix-pattern end 1)
          (and (re-search-forward "[[:blank:]]*" end 1)
               (replace-match " " t t)))))))

(defun ivan/filter-ag-whitespace ()
  (ivan/filter-whitespace ag/file-column-pattern))

(advice-add 'ag-filter :after #'ivan/filter-ag-whitespace)

The structure of the filter is identical to ag-filter itself, just the while loop differs. I thought it might be nice to apply the same filter to the *Occur* buffer, but when all the results are from the same file I think the indentation lends worthwhile context.

The final result:

However, the downside is this breaks wgrep functionality, probably because wgrep is looking for an exact match. I had to rig up a workaround that recompiles the search results with whitespace intact when wgrep is engaged.

(define-key ag-mode-map
  [remap wgrep-change-to-wgrep-mode] #'ivan/init-wgrep-mode)

(defun ivan/init-wgrep-mode ()
  (interactive)
  (advice-remove 'ag-filter #'ivan/filter-ag-whitespace)
  (add-hook 'ag-search-finished-hook #'ivan/enable-wgrep-mode)
  (recompile))

(defun ivan/enable-wgrep-mode ()
  (remove-hook 'ag-search-finished-hook #'ivan/enable-wgrep-mode)
  (advice-add 'ag-filter :after #'ivan/filter-ag-whitespace)
  (wgrep-change-to-wgrep-mode))