script stuck in try-except block

Question

I am currently working on a Python script that essentially scrapes a given Twitter account for Spotify tracks and creates a playlist of the tracks found. The script is functioning properly for the most part but I am trying to incorporate some error handling and am running into some issues. The first error I want to tackle is when a user enters a Spotify/Twitter username that isn't valid.

So far, I have created 2 separate try-except loops to continuously prompt the user for their Twitter and Spotify usernames until valid ones are entered. The Twitter try-except loop seems to be functioning properly but the Spotify loop gets stuck if an incorrect username is entered (ie does not except valid username and won't terminate when ^C is entered).

Twitter try-except loop:

# Get request token from Twitter
    reqclient = Twython(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
    reqcreds = reqclient.get_authentication_tokens()

    # Prompt user for Twitter account information until valid account is found
    validated = False
    while validated == False:
        try:
            t_username = input("Please enter your TWITTER username: ")
            user_info = reqclient.show_user(screen_name=t_username)
        # except TwythonError as e:
        except:
            print("Could not find Twitter account " + t_username + ". Please try again.")
            # print(e)
            continue
        else:
            t_user_id = user_info["id"]
            validated = True

Spotify try-except loop:

    # Create a SpotifyOAuth object to begin authroization code flow
    scope = 'playlist-modify-public playlist-read-collaborative playlist-read-private playlist-modify-private' # Specifies access/user authorization needed to perform request (i.e. create playlist)
    sp_oauth = spotipy.oauth2.SpotifyOAuth(client_id=client_id,client_secret=client_secret,redirect_uri=redirect_uri,scope=scope)

    # Prompt user for Spotify account information until valid account is found
    validated = False
    while validated == False:
        try:
            s_username = input("Please enter your SPOTIFY username: ")
            user_info = sp_oauth.current_user()
        except:
            print("Could not find Spotify account " + s_username + ". Please try again.")
            continue
        else:
            s_user_id = user_info["id"]
            validated = True

Am I missing something here? I feel like it's really obvious but I can't seem to find the issue (and apologies if this is the case)?

Answer 1

There are two things going on here.

First, the value of s_username that you enter is never actually applied to any sort of Spotify API object, so the result of sp_oauth.current_user() is never going to change.

The second, and more important, issue is that you are using a blanket except statement which catches all exceptions. This is causing problems for you because it's also catching the KeyboardInterrupt exception that normally allows you to exit a program by pressing CTRL-C . You should almost always narrow the exception you are catching to the specific error type you want to handle.