Python & pylast - AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'encode' python

Question

I'm a complete noob who just started learning Python. I'm playing around with the pylast library for Last.fm to pull a list of a user's neighbours & some of their attributes, but when I try to print a neighbour's country, I get the following error:

thrillofme
None
0
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/Moi/DSR/Week 2/My tutorials/my-lastfm-thing-3.py", line 24, in <module>
    print country
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/pylast.py", line 944, in r
    return _string(funct(*args))
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/pylast.py", line 3497, in _string
return text.encode("utf-8")
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'encode'

Looking at some other solutions to this error message, I get the impression that country is not encoded correctly to print, but I can't quite figure out what to do about it. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Here's my code.

import pylast

api_key = "XXX"
username = "Strangelove"
network = pylast.LastFMNetwork(api_key = api_key)
user = pylast.User(username, network)

# Let's pull a list of the specified user's Last.fm neighbours.
# Neighbours are users with a similar taste in music.

neighbours = user.get_neighbours()

for i in neighbours:
    gender = i.get_gender()
    age = i.get_age()
    country = i.get_country()
    print i
    print gender
    print age
    print country

Answer 1

The country name is missing, but the pylast library is not dealing with that case correctly. You'll have to test for the empty country case yourself:

if country.name:
    print country

Answer 2

I've fixed this in my fork of pylast.

When you call country = i.get_country(), it now returns None instead of a Country object where name is None.