Parsing multi-part sitemap.xml with Python

A perfectly valid sitemap.xml can be split into multiple files. For that see, the specs at https://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html. This is likely to happen in any content management system. For example WordPress loves to split your sitemaps into multiple dynamically generated parts to reduce the size of single XML-download.

It should be an easy task to slurp in the entire sitemap containing all the child-maps, right? I wouldn't be blogging about it, if it would be that easy.

Best solution I bumped into was by Viktor Petersson and his Python gist. I had to fix his sub-sitemap parsing algorithm first to get a desired result. What he didn't account was the fact, that a sub-sitemap address can have URL-parameters in it. Those dynamically generated ones do sometimes have that.

Go get my version from https://gist.github.com/HQJaTu/cd66cf659b8ee633685b43c5e7e92f05

My thanks go to Mr. Petersson and Mr. Addyman for creating the initial versions.