BeautifulSoup counting tags without parsing deep inside them

I thought about the following while writing an answer to this question.

Suppose I have a deeply nested xml file like this (but much more nested and much longer):

<section name="1">
    <subsection name"foo">
        <subsubsection name="bar">
            <deeper name="hey">
                <much_deeper name"yo">
                    <li>Some content</li>
                </much_deeper>
            </deeper>
        </subsubsection>
    </subsection>
</section>
<section name="2">
    ... and so forth
</section>

The problem with len(soup.find_all("section")) is that BS kind of "carries" the whole tree for each element in this process.

So, two questions:

1. Is there a way to make BS count the number of section without returning the whole content?


2. Is it more efficient or is it the same internal process?