Feature request: I'd like to be able to instruct my OAI client to return harvested metadata records unparsed, as Strings

[landreev]

I'm going to make a PR with a working model implementation. With the assumption that it'll need to be reworked before it gets accepted.

[poikilotherm]

@landreev to understand better what you are trying to achieve in order to properly review the PR: can we cook up an example that better explains what you want to do?

Let's say we have this as part of an response when harvesting:

<ListRecords>
  <record>
    <header>
      [...]
    </header>
    <metadata>
     <rfc1807 xmlns="http://info.internet.isi.edu:80/in-notes/rfc/files/rfc1807.txt" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://info.internet.isi.edu:80/in-notes/rfc/files/rfc1807.txt http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/1.1/rfc1807.xsd">
        <bib-version>v2</bib-version>
        <id>hep-th/9901001</id>
     </rfc1807>
    </metadata>
    <about>
      [...]
    </about>
  </record>
 </ListRecords>

Is your intent to quickly get an unparsed, raw string of the <metadata> element? With the example above, that would be:

<rfc1807 xmlns="http://info.internet.isi.edu:80/in-notes/rfc/files/rfc1807.txt" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://info.internet.isi.edu:80/in-notes/rfc/files/rfc1807.txt http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/1.1/rfc1807.xsd">
  <bib-version>v2</bib-version>
  <id>hep-th/9901001</id>
</rfc1807>

Is that correct? Assuming yes: what are you doing after this with the XML metadata? Would it help to parse it some other way or return a more specific structure than a String?