Title: `None` converted to `"None"` when loading a dataset
Author: eladsegal (CONTRIBUTOR)
State: closed
Created: 2021-10-29T15:23:53Z
Labels: bug

## Describe the bug
When loading a dataset `None` values of the type `NoneType` are converted to `'None'` of the type `str`.

## Steps to reproduce the bug
```python
from datasets import load_dataset
qasper = load_dataset("qasper", split="train", download_mode="reuse_cache_if_exists")
print(qasper[60]["full_text"]["section_name"])
```

When installing version 1.1.40, the output is
`[None, 'Introduction', 'Benchmark Datasets', ...]`

When installing from the master branch, the output is
`['None', 'Introduction', 'Benchmark Datasets', ...]`

Notice how the first element was changed from `NoneType` to `str`.

## Expected results
`None` should stay as is.

## Actual results
`None` is converted to a string.

## Environment info
<!-- You can run the command `datasets-cli env` and copy-and-paste its output below. -->
- `datasets` version: master
- Platform: Linux-4.4.0-19041-Microsoft-x86_64-with-glibc2.17
- Python version: 3.8.10
- PyArrow version: 4.0.1

Comments:
Hi @eladsegal, thanks for reporting.

@mariosasko I saw you are already working on this, but maybe my comment will be useful to you.

All values are casted to their corresponding feature type (including `None` values). For example if the feature type is `Value("bool")`, `None` is casted to `False`.

It is true that strings were an exception, but this was recently fixed by @lhoestq (see #3158).

Thanks for reporting.

This is actually a breaking change that I think can cause issues when users preprocess their data. String columns used to be nullable. Maybe we can correct https://github.com/huggingface/datasets/pull/3158 to keep the None values and avoid this breaking change ?

EDIT: the other types (bool, int, etc) can also become nullable IMO

So what would be the best way to handle a feature that can have a null value in some of the instances? So far I used `None`.
Using the empty string won't be a good option, as it can be an actual value in the data and is not the same as not having a value at all.

Hi @eladsegal,

Use `None`. As @albertvillanova correctly pointed out, this change in conversion was introduced (by mistake) in #3158. To avoid it, install the earlier revision with:
```
pip install git+https://github.com/huggingface/datasets.git@8107844ec0e7add005db0585c772ee20adc01a5e
```

I'm making all the feature types nullable as we speak, and the fix will be merged probably early next week.

Hi @mariosasko, is there an estimation as to when this issue will be fixed?

https://github.com/huggingface/datasets/pull/3195 fixed it, we'll do a new release soon :)

For now feel free to install `datasets` from the master branch

Thanks, but unfortunately looks like it isn't fixed yet 😢 
[notebook for 1.14.0](https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1SV3sFXPJMWSQgbm4pr9Y1Q8OJ4JYKcDo?usp=sharing)
[notebook for master](https://colab.research.google.com/drive/145wDpuO74MmsuI0SVLcI1IswG6aHpyhi?usp=sharing)

Oh, sorry. I deleted the fix by accident when I was resolving a merge conflict. Let me fix this real quick.

Thank you, it works! 🎊