Python Lxml (objectify): Checking whether a tag exists

Question

I need to check whether a certain tag exists in an xml file.

For example, I want to see if the tag exists in this snippet:

Answer 1

Assume you want to get elem2's value, you can use xpath to find it.

tree = etree.parse(StringIO(htmlString), etree.HTMLParser()).getroot()
youWantValue = tree.xpath('/main/elem2')[0].text