My XML file has no tags, which makes parsing not so friendly. I'm trying to find an element and change it: ... <dict> <key>Arguments</key> <dict> <key>TestArchive</key <string>testArchive.tar</string> </dict> .... </dict> ... What I'm trying to do is to get and change "testArchive.tar" string, because this string may change every time, I use TestArchive as an anchor from xml.etree import ElementTree with open ('file.xml', 'rt') as f: tree = ElementTree.parse(f) for item in tree.iter(): if item.text == "TestArchive": .... How can I get the next element? Which in my case supposed to be the item I'm looking for? Continue reading...