import xml.etree.ElementTree as eT androidNs = 'http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android' eT.register_namespace('android', androidNs) tree = eT.parse('data.xml') root = tree.getroot() print root.attrib root.set('myAtr', 'myValue') root.set('{{{0}}}myAtr'.format(androidNs), '777') root.set('android:MyAttribute', 'Rustam') tree.write('output.xml', xml_declaration=True, encoding='utf-8', method="xml") print root.tag