[FIXED] Why am I getting "list index out of range"?

Issue

I'm pretty new to Python, and I have a Python function that's supposed to get the HTML from a Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population) and, for the purposes of this question, get the HTML in the first column in each row. I'm using Python and BeautifulSoup4.

def getStates():
page = requests.get("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population")
soup = BeautifulSoup(page.text, "html.parser")

table = soup.find("tbody") 
rows = table.findAll("tr")

for row in rows:
    columns = row.findAll("td")
    print(columns[0])

The "columns" variable should be a list, which I know because:

1. print(columns) gives me multiple lists of HTML (because of the for loop) enclosed in square brackets and commas.

2. print(len(columns)) returns "9", meaning there's 9 columns in each row, which can be confirmed by counting the columns in the Wikipedia page.

3. The findAll() function returns a list, as shown in the BS4 documentation: https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/#find-all

However, if I do print(columns[0]), or any index, I get the following error: IndexError: list index out of range. And so, can someone give me any idea as to what I'm doing wrong? I feel like I'm making an obvious mistake here but trying to search up this problem didn't yield any results.

Solution

I had a list of lists, but as @juanpa.arrivillaga said, I didn't realize the first list (in index 0) was empty.

Answered By - sping