Confusion about reviews' "title" field

[LinqLover]

Each review contains a field named title, but in our scenario, it is always null. I took a look at the code and found the following confusing fragments:

• https://github.com/facundoolano/google-play-scraper/blob/50502284a7f6d2ffbf21a5b12feca1fe4a19f13d/lib/utils/reviewsList.js#L30-L33
• https://github.com/facundoolano/google-play-scraper/blob/50502284a7f6d2ffbf21a5b12feca1fe4a19f13d/test/lib.reviews.js#L17

What is this about? Is this a feature "not yet implemented", does this exist for backward compatibility, or is it simply a slip? Should API users use or ignore this field in order to collect a maximum of useful data?

It would be great if you could answer this question and, ideally, add short documentation of it in the readme.

[LinqLover]

Apparently, this change was introduced via #341. @icarcal Could you maybe enlighten us? :-)

[LinqLover]

Looking at the documentation, I assume this is a feature for backward compatibility indeed:

Property name	Value	Description	Notes
[...]
comments[].userComment.text	string	The content of the comment, i.e. review body. In some cases users have been able to write a review with separate title and body; in those cases the title and body are concatenated and separated by a tab character.
[...]

Please let me know if this assumption is correct. Documentation would still be nice. :-)

[icarcal]

@LinqLover this is indeed for backward compatibility. Google seems to be returned the title in some old comments, and we can probably add the mappings again to have null or the title in case this exist.

[LinqLover]

Thank you @icarcal for the feedback. It might be helpful to document this decision directly in the repository. :-)

[icarcal]

I found the comment, explaining why I did this https://github.com/facundoolano/google-play-scraper/pull/337#discussion_r322223733

I had this "documented" by a comment in reviews example, but it was probably lost. Going to add this again, thanks for pointing that out.

[ivanhjel]

@icarcal is this added back again? I still seem to only have "null" titles 😅