PyMuPDF: skipping bad link / annot item 0

Question

I use PyMuPDF's insert_link to add links to a PDF. But when I do it, I sometimes get the warning skipping bad link / annot item 0. When I highlight the same rect with add_highlight_annot the area is highlighted. There is just no link. This happens to some words, but I can't find a connection between them. What does the warning mean exactly?

Bellow is the code I use:

doc = fitz.open('test.pdf')
term = "hello"
for page in doc:
    rects = page.search_for(term)
    for rect in rects:
       page.add_highlight_annot(rect)
       l = {'kind': 2, 'from': rect, 'uri': link, 'id': ''}
       page.insert_link(l)

Maybe first use `print()` (and `print(type(...))`, `print(len(...))`, etc.) to see which part of code is executed and what you really have in variables. It is called `"print debuging"` and it helps to see what code is really doing. — furas, Oct 20 '22 at 19:37
thanks for the tip. Turns out that the link text was of for some links and a `)` was missing. — Mazze, Oct 20 '22 at 21:58

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 22 '22 at 11:59

This may happen if some text of the link is not UTF-8 encodedable. Internally in PyMuPDF's C code, PDF objects for defining the link are created from their representation as text source. The error occurs if the Python C-function PyUnicode_AsUTF8 fails. In your context most probably the URI text should be the problem.

PyMuPDF: skipping bad link / annot item 0

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