Any ideas on a better way to handle this than lifting the path string out of an SVG file and hard-coding it into the code?
Not really! If the SVG existed somewhere else on the page, you could snag the path out of it like `path.getAttribute("d");`
Also, all those line breaks and tabs shoudn't be necessary. My guess is Illustrator exported it that way and you were trying to remain faithful to it's output by replicating the whitespace. Honestly I have no idea why it does whitespace that way sometimes. Although, it should _only_ do that when you're doing something like "Save As..." an SVG, which, IMO, is a bad idea. Like we talked about in
this thread, Illustrator can export in a pretty nice way (that won't have any weird whitespace). Then just save your original as an `.ai` file, since you might as well save with all of Illustrator's native conveniences.