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Abstract

RR Lyrae stars and Cepheids play a pivotal role in the study of the Universe. From Milky Way archaeology to cosmology, these variable stars contribute significantly to a myriad of fields. Many large-scale photometric surveys have classified and characterized these stars into various subtypes. However, no single survey is complete, and many of them suffer from varying degrees of contamination. The main goal of this study is to generate a homogeneous, pure, and complete (to date) catalog of Cepheids and RR Lyrae stars in the Milky Way and in the Magellanic Clouds. To this end, we have homogenized RR Lyrae and Cepheid (classical, Type-II, and anomalous) catalogs from eight wide-field optical surveys. We developed a new Bhattacharyya distance-based algorithm for a probabilistic cross-match of these catalogs, taking into account the full astrometry covariance matrix and variability periods. We compared all surveys against each other and numerous literature catalogs to validate their periods and classification. We complemented our compilation by cross-matching with cleaned catalogs of more than 20 other photometric and spectroscopic surveys. These data were used to compute about 200 newly-defined, highly-precise and accurate period-Wesenheit relations. These relations enable the computation of distances at over 98 percent accuracy and better than two percent precision. We release a catalog of about 330\,000 Cepheids and RR~Lyrae stars with more than 1000 features, including periods, subtype classification, optical and infrared photometry, line-of-sight velocities, and distances. This catalog, named RRLCep, holds significant potential in the context of Milky Way archaeology and near-field cosmology.