Programmatically check if PHP is installed using Python

Programmatically check if PHP is installed using Python

Using python, how would I check if PHP is installed on my server (CentOS
6.4)? Most of the googled resources point in the opposite direction, i.e
to check if the python module is installed in PHP.
Is there any way to check if PHP (whatever version) is installed on the
server using Python?
EDIT: I have written a bash script which simply calls php -v and that can
be called from within python, but is there any other way in Python
directly?