'Searches for node in an element tree.
Attempts to return only the first node found for an xpath query. Meant
to cut down on exception handling boilerplate.
Args:
base_node (Element): Document node to begin querying from.
xpath_query (str): XPath query to define nodes to search for.
Returns:
Element: First node found that matches the query.'

def get_node(self, base_node, xpath_query):

    try:
        node = base_node.xpath(xpath_query)[0]
    except IndexError:
        node = None
    return node
