I like to write small utilities to make my life easier (mostly forwork). My job often entails tasks that are repetitive or at least periodically recurring.

One such task is adding a machineKey tag to the web.config file of the web applications installations we deploy.

While there are a number of ways to generate a machineKey, I get these machine keys from the Developer Fusion Machine Key Generator site.

The Machine Key generator makes life easy by giving you a key, however the way it is output is rather cumbersome: It outputs the code over 11 lines, which are comprised of empty white-space lines and loads of space characters.

I like to keep a clean and tidy web.config file, and because the machineKey should hardly be touched, prefer to keep it all on a single line.

After having enough of ctrl-shift-arrow-delete/backspace-ing to tidy this up, I wrote a handy utility to do it for me.

To use it, I feed the code from Developer Fusion into the textbox, click the button and then copy out the cleansed result.

You can see how I built the tool below.

HTML

<textarea id="txtData" cols="70" rows="7"></textarea>
<br />
<input type="button" onclick="FixData()" value="Un-Linebreak" />

JavaScript

function FixData() {
    var ctrl = document.querySelector('#txtData');
    var txt = ctrl.value;

    txt = txt.replace(/[\r\n+]/g, " ");
    txt = txt.replace(/\s\s+/g, " ");

    ctrl.value = txt;
}

Result

Silvrback doesnt currently allow embedding of the result from Codepen, but you can [see the working result here:

So there you go, an easy way to get rid of line breaks and excess white space, in a single click (excluding the clicks to load it up).

I have the link to the working utility pinned to my Chrome bookmark bar for quick access.

While the tool might not seem like that much of a time saving, it does actually save me a dozen seconds or so per application I work on, (1.5 x websites/week) x (12 seconds x 52 weeks) = about 15 minutes per year that I have just saved myself- and now you.