Python Script to Generate sitemap.xml

This small script reads a list of URLs and writes an XML sitemap. It uses only the standard library of Python.

from datetime import date
from xml.sax.saxutils import escape

def build_sitemap(urls, lastmod):
    lines = ['<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>',
             '<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">']
    for url in urls:
        lines.append("  <url>")
        lines.append("    <loc>" + escape(url) + "</loc>")
        lines.append("    <lastmod>" + lastmod + "</lastmod>")
        lines.append("  </url>")
    lines.append("</urlset>")
    return "\n".join(lines)

with open("urls.txt") as f:
    urls = [line.strip() for line in f if line.strip()]

xml = build_sitemap(urls, date(2026, 9, 1).isoformat())

with open("sitemap.xml", "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    f.write(xml + "\n")

print(len(urls), "URLs written to sitemap.xml")

How it works

• The script reads one URL per line from urls.txt.
• escape() changes the special characters like & in URLs, so the XML stays valid.
• It writes a loc and a lastmod for each page. Use the real date of the last change for each page, not always today.
• xmllint is a tool to check that the XML is well formed.

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