use try except, here's an extreme example from the lxml manual:
try: from lxml import etree print("running with lxml.etree") except ImportError: try: # Python 2.5 import xml.etree.cElementTree as etree print("running with cElementTree on Python 2.5+") except ImportError: try: # Python 2.5 import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree print("running with ElementTree on Python 2.5+") except ImportError: try: # normal cElementTree install import cElementTree as etree print("running with cElementTree") except ImportError: try: # normal ElementTree install import elementtree.ElementTree as etree print("running with ElementTree") except ImportError: print("Failed to import ElementTree from any known place")