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Loading JavaScript from a string in C# with HTTPWebRequest

In this guide, we'll show you how to load JavaScript from a string when converting HTML to PDF using C# and the HTTPWebRequest library.

When converting HTML to PDF, you might want to include JavaScript functionality using inline code.

using System;
using System.Net;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using System.Threading.Tasks;

// You can get an API key at https://pdfshift.io
var apiKey = "sk_xxxxxxxxxxxx";

var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("https://api.pdfshift.io/v3/convert/pdf");
request.Method = "POST";
request.ContentType = "application/json";
request.Headers.Add("X-API-Key", apiKey);

var payload = new
{
    source = "https://www.example.com",
    // Load JavaScript from a string
    javascript = "document.body.style.backgroundColor = 'red';"
};

var json = System.Text.Json.JsonSerializer.Serialize(payload);
byte[] data = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(json);
request.ContentLength = data.Length;

using (var stream = request.GetRequestStream())
{
    stream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
}

try
{
    var response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
    
    // Handle errors:
    if (response.StatusCode >= HttpStatusCode.BadRequest)
    {
        throw new Exception($"Request failed with status code {response.StatusCode}");
    }

    using (var reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))
    {
        var result = reader.ReadToEnd();
        File.WriteAllText("result.pdf", result);
    }

    Console.WriteLine("The PDF document was generated and saved to result.pdf");
}
catch (WebException ex)
{
    Console.WriteLine($"Error: {ex.Message}");
}

This enables dynamic behavior in your PDFs.

For further details on the javascript property and its usage, please refer to our dedicated documentation.

We hope this guide was helpful. If you have any questions or noticed any issues on the code above,
feel free to drop us a line.