Issue: Include `metadata.jsonl` in resolved data files
State: closed
Author: mariosasko

Include `metadata.jsonl` in resolved data files.

Fix #4548 

@lhoestq ~~https://github.com/huggingface/datasets/commit/d94336d30eef17fc9abc67f67fa1c139661f4e75 adds support for metadata files placed at the root, and https://github.com/huggingface/datasets/commit/4d20618ea7a19bc143ddc5fdff9d79e671fcbb95 accounts for nested metadata files also, but this results in more complex code. Let me know which one of these two approaches you prefer.~~ Maybe https://github.com/huggingface/datasets/commit/d94336d30eef17fc9abc67f67fa1c139661f4e75 is good enough for now (for the sake of simplicity). https://github.com/huggingface/datasets/commit/4d20618ea7a19bc143ddc5fdff9d79e671fcbb95 breaks the imagefolder tests due to duplicates in the resolved metadata files. One way to fix this would be to resolve the metadata pattern only on parent directories, but this adds even more logic to `_get_data_files_patterns`, so not sure if this is what we should do.

Comments:
_The documentation is not available anymore as the PR was closed or merged._

I still don't know if the way we implemented data files resolution could support the metadata.jsonl file without bad side effects for the other packaged builders. In particular here if you have a folder of csv/parquet/whatever files and a metadata.jsonl file, it would return 
```
split: patterns_dict[split] + [METADATA_PATTERN]
```
which is a bit unexpected and can lead to errors.

Maybe this logic can be specific to imagefolder somehow ? This could be an additional pattern `["metadata.jsonl", "**/metadata.jsonl"]` just for imagefolder, that is only used when `data_files=` is not specified by the user.

I guess it's ok to have patterns that lead to duplicate metadata.jsonl files for imagefolder, since the imagefolder logic only considers the closest metadata file for each image.

What do you think ?

Yes, that's indeed the problem. My solution in https://github.com/huggingface/datasets/commit/4d20618ea7a19bc143ddc5fdff9d79e671fcbb95 that accounts for that (include metadata files only if image files are present; not ideal): https://github.com/huggingface/datasets/blob/4d20618ea7a19bc143ddc5fdff9d79e671fcbb95/src/datasets/data_files.py#L119-L125.
Perhaps a cleaner approach would be to check for metadata files after the packaged module type is inferred as `imagefolder` and append metadata files to already resolved data files (if there are any). WDYT?

@lhoestq 

> Perhaps a cleaner approach would be to check for metadata files after the packaged module type is inferred as imagefolder and append metadata files to already resolved data files (if there are any). WDYT?

I decided to go with this approach.

 Not sure if you meant the same thing with this comment:

> Maybe this logic can be specific to imagefolder somehow ? This could be an additional pattern ["metadata.jsonl", "**/metadata.jsonl"] just for imagefolder, that is only used when data_files= is not specified by the user.


It adds more code but is easy to follow IMO.


The CI still struggles but you can merge since at least one of the two WIN CI succeeded