title: get first element from a list without exception
body: <p>Consider this code</p>
  
  <pre><code>description = ""
  desc = hxs.select('/html/head/meta[2]/@content').extract()
  if len(desc) &gt; 0:
      description = desc[0]       
  item["description"] = description
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>desc is a list of strings. If list is empty description is an empty string, if not it's the first elements from the list. How to make it more pythonic?</p>
  
  <p>Forgot to mention that I have to use 2.7</p>