Cannot deal with archives with subdirectories about python-dwca-reader HOT 4 CLOSED

Thanks for your report. I'm not sure if it is a valid archive or not (the standard is not always as clear as I'd like it to be), but it seems there are such archives in the wild and it shouldn't be too difficult to support, so I'll give it a try!

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I'm a little ambivalent about this issue.

• My initial reaction is to support it like that: if an Archive contains a single directory, let's consider it as the Archive root and make things work. I'm not sure if it's a technically valid archive, but supporting it would be easy/low-risk and may help some people. If I remember correctly, some IPT versions produced such archives.
• But the Archive submitted above wouldn't work, since it contains two directories at the root (there's also the infamous __MACOSX directory, probably silently created by Mac OS X Finder's when the Archive was manually hacked). I don't really see a simple and resilient way for the DwCAReader to open such an archive (entering each subdirectory in the Archive root and looking for something that actually looks like a DwCA seems a bit too far-fetched).

To me, it looks like an error at GBIF to provide such a sample file for their DwCA validator. I'd be tempted to not fix it here (or just the single-directory simple case) and report it as an issue to GBIF. What do you think, @nickynicolson ?

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Thanks @niconoe - I agree.
Re your first point: I've seen a lot of these single sub-directory archives in use - perhaps from IPT instances, but also from the Scratchpads project and emonocot. If we can jump into the subdir when only one subdir exists, that seems like a good solution.

I also agree that the sample DWCA referenced from the GBIF validator should be cleaner.

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That's good to know. I'll implement this "single subdir fix" so at least we support those common archives!

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