Extract appropriate R objects from EML dataTable about eml HOT 3 CLOSED

Read should be able to handle local files, not just online files. Likewise an issue for eml_write #2

from eml.

Bug in date time parsing:

out <- eml_read("http://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/data/eml/hf205.xml")
head(out$dataframe)
out$col_metadata
out$unit_metadata

In other reading checks, note that this EML file also arbitrarily declares that the data has 9999 columns, while we see that it has

dim(out$dataframe)[1]
[1] 279224

Issues and next steps

Of course eml_read is still a work in progress. In particular:

(Also note that eml_read still needs a dateTime parser on the unit_metadata....)

• How do we deal with dateTime when defined across multiple columns?

from eml.

• dateTime bug fixed in 8b7ffee by coercing to character. remaining dateTime issues are now in #17
• The Harvard Forest hf205.xml example still does some wierd things, e.g. the run id numbers (1-6) are encoded as character strings, where a ordered factor might have been more appropriate. Guess we should just obey the metadata we are given...
• The basic example proposed at the top of this issue does not demonstrate different encodings well, e.g. it uses only a trivial ratio unit (count) and no ordered factors or characters...

from eml.