Issue resolving Python list index error when processing nested API responses

I am getting IndexError: list index out of range at line 45 in my data parser, which processes nested JSON objects from a REST endpoint. The crash happens intermittently — I suspect some response structures have fewer elements than expected or are missing fields entirely. Here is the relevant code block:

for item in data['results']:
    name = item[1]           # Line 45 - this crashes sometimes
    score = item[2]         # also risky
    process(item)

The API documentation says results should have 3 elements, but production payloads are inconsistent. I am considering using .get() with default values or a try/except block around the indexing. Which is more idiomatic for this case? Also, if there's a way to validate the schema before iterating that would be cleaner than repeated error handling inside the loop, please let me know

The answer is literally in issue #842 on the main repo and pinned at the top of the Slack channel for a reason — someone already wrote this up three weeks ago, but apparently reading thread history isn't within everyone's scope.

Specifically: your nested access `data['