Spotipy - list index out of range

Question

Writing a Spotipy script to return album tracks from a given album I'm occasionally getting the error:

    album_id = results["albums"]["items"][0]["uri"]
IndexError: list index out of range

The error tends to happen for more popular artists looping over all of their albums. I'm guessing results list has either reached it's limit or it's getting out of sequence somehow. Either way I'm not sure how to fix it as I'm pretty sure I got the album_id line off the Spotipy website. Any ideas?

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import spotipy

sp = spotipy.Spotify()
sp.trace = False


def get_artist_albums(artist):
  results = sp.search(q = "artist:" + artist, type = "artist")
  items = results["artists"]["items"]
  artist = items[0]
  # print artist

  albums = []
  albumsTitles  = []
  results = sp.artist_albums(artist["id"], album_type = "album")
  albums.extend(results["items"])
  while results["next"]:
    results = sp.next(results)
    albums.extend(results["items"])
  seen = set() # to avoid dups
  albums.sort(key = lambda album:album["name"].lower())

  for album in albums:
    albumTitle = album["name"]
    if albumTitle not in seen:
      print((" " + albumTitle))
      seen.add(albumTitle)
      albumsTitles.append(albumTitle)

  # return albumsTitles
  return albumsTitles 

def get_albums_tracks(album):
  albumtracks = []

  results = sp.search(q = "album:" + album, type = "album")

  # get the first album uri
  album_id = results["albums"]["items"][0]["uri"]

  # get album tracks
  tracks = sp.album_tracks(album_id)
  c = 1
  # print album
  for track in tracks["items"]:
    # print "#%s %s" %(c, track["name"])
    albumtracks.append(track["name"])
    c +=1
  return albumtracks


# 3 album band - ok
phosgoreAlbums = get_artist_albums("Phosgore")
for item in phosgoreAlbums:
  print get_albums_tracks(item)
  print ""

# 6 album band - ok
# (well technically 2, but's let not get into that night now)
joyDivisionAlbums = get_artist_albums("Joy Division")
for item in joyDivisionAlbums:
  print get_albums_tracks(item)
  print ""

# 34 albums - falls over
cherAlbums = get_artist_albums("Cher")
for item in cherAlbums:
  print get_albums_tracks(item)
  print ""

# 38 album band - falls over
theCureAlbums = get_artist_albums("The Cure")
for item in theCureAlbums:
  print get_albums_tracks(item)
  print ""

# 43 album band - falls over
aliceCooperAlbums = get_artist_albums("Alice Cooper")
for item in aliceCooperAlbums:
  print get_albums_tracks(item)
  print ""

Answer 1

results["albums"]["items"] is simply an empty list, so there is no element at index 0. You could test for that before trying to index into it:

if not results["albums"]["items"]:
    # no albums found, so no tracks either
    return []

album_id = results["albums"]["items"][0]["uri"]