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Hi,
Instead of making all metadata elements lists which is a bit messy code wise (especially for something that is not a common event) it may be easier and cleaner to check if a value with that key already exists and if so appending a string delimiter (can be any unique identifier string we want - '"&#$%" or whatever) and then add the new data to the end. That if there is only 1 author or many authors, all data is stored in a simple string in the metadata dictionary.
Clean and easy to do using .get(key, '"") on the key to return either the current value for that key or the null string, if not null you append the string delimiter, then you just append the new value for the key. It also works with encoding to utf-8 quite easily.
When we go to write it out, simply split on the string delimiter and write out each one. If there is no delimiter present in the string , you will only write out 1.
As for keeping all values for metadata, I am for that but we need to be careful in that some mobs will have binary data in some metadata values (left over from keys previously used for DRM, etc) and we can run into byte values that do not exist in utf-8. So we may want to hex or base64 encode these values if you want to maintain them in some way.
My two cents,
Kevin
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