How do I ping a .onion address in python?

I am writing a program that generates .onion URLs and then checks to see if that URL is real. How do I ping a .onion URL? The URLs generated by my program are in the format xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.onion. If this means anything, I am not new to Python itself but I am completely new to using python for networking so please make the example code easy to figure out. Thank you in advance.