tonhowtf/omniget · error

Could not resolve short link

Error message

Could not resolve short link

What it means

resolve_short_link walks the redirect target extracted from the short-link page and, if no resolvable full URL is found in the HTML, returns this error. It means a TikTok short link (vm.tiktok.com / vt.tiktok.com style) could not be converted to a canonical video URL.

Solutions

  1. Retry later — the failure is often a transient bot-wall
  2. Follow HTTP redirects directly (send with redirect policy enabled) instead of scraping HTML
  3. Update the extraction patterns to match TikTok's current page markup
  4. Ask the user for the full canonical tiktok.com/@user/video/ID URL

Example fix

// before: scrape HTML for the target URL
Err(anyhow!("Could not resolve short link"))
// after: follow redirects natively
let resp = self.client.get(short_url).send().await?;
let full = resp.url().to_string();
if !full.contains("/video/") { return Err(anyhow!("Could not resolve short link: {}", full)); }
Defensive patterns

Strategy: fallback

Validate before calling

if url.contains("vm.tiktok.com") || url.contains("vt.tiktok.com") {
    // expect resolution step; pre-check the link responds
}

Type guard

fn is_short_link(url: &str) -> bool {
    url.contains("vm.tiktok.com") || url.contains("vt.tiktok.com")
}

Try / catch

match resolve_short_link(url).await {
    Err(e) if e.to_string().contains("Could not resolve short link") => {
        ask_user_for_full_url(url)
    }
    other => other,
}

Prevention

When it happens

Trigger: get_media_info receives a short TikTok link and the fetched page contains none of the expected URL patterns (e.g. the page is a captcha, an app-download interstitial, or the redirect markup changed).

Common situations: Expired or deleted short links, TikTok serving a captcha/bot wall instead of a redirect page, or TikTok changing the HTML structure that resolve_short_link scrapes.

Understand the failure class

Background: "Invalid URL" / "URL cannot be empty": fix the malformed or missing URL behind request-construction failures — this error's family across 50 libraries.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of tonhowtf/omniget@8600b91f42 (2026-09-12). Data as JSON: /api/errors/7b68b06afd8a9a0f. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at src-tauri/src/platforms/tiktok/mod.rs:111

            .headers()
            .get("location")
            .and_then(|v| v.to_str().ok())
        {
            let clean = location.split('?').next().unwrap_or(location).to_string();
            return Ok(clean);
        }

        let html = response.text().await?;

        if html.starts_with("<a href=\"https://") {
            if let Some(url_part) = html.split("<a href=\"").nth(1) {
                let full_url = url_part.split('"').next().unwrap_or(url_part);
                let clean = full_url.split('?').next().unwrap_or(full_url).to_string();
                return Ok(clean);
            }
        }

        Err(anyhow!("Could not resolve short link"))
    }

    fn is_captcha_page(html: &str) -> bool {
        html.contains("verify-bar-close")
            || html.contains("captcha_verify")
            || html.contains("tiktok-verify-page")
            || html.contains("verify/page")
            || (html.contains("Verify to continue")
                && !html.contains("__UNIVERSAL_DATA_FOR_REHYDRATION__"))
    }

    fn is_valid_play_addr(url: &str) -> bool {
        if url.is_empty() {
            return false;
        }
        if !url.starts_with("http://") && !url.starts_with("https://") {
            return false;
        }

View on GitHub (pinned to 8600b91f42)