How to parse a csv string into a Spark dataframe using scala? - scala

Question

I would like to convert a RDD containing records of strings, like below, to a Spark dataframe.
"Mike,2222-003330,NY,34"
"Kate,3333-544444,LA,32"
"Abby,4444-234324,MA,56"
....
The schema line is not inside the same RDD, but in a another variable:
val header = "name,account,state,age"
So now my question is, how do I use the above two, to create a dataframe in Spark? I am using Spark version 2.2.
I did search and saw a post:
Can I read a CSV represented as a string into Apache Spark using spark-csv
.
However it's not exactly what I need and I can't figure out a way to modify this piece of code to work in my case.
Your help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The easier way would probably be to start from the CSV file and read it directly as a dataframe (by specifying the schema). You can see an example here: Provide schema while reading csv file as a dataframe.
When the data already exists in an RDD you can use toDF() to convert to a dataframe. This function also accepts column names as input. To use this functionality, first import the spark implicits using the SparkSession object:
val spark: SparkSession = SparkSession.builder.getOrCreate()
import spark.implicits._
Since the RDD contains strings it needs to first be converted to tuples representing the columns in the dataframe. In this case, this will be a RDD[(String, String, String, Int)] since there are four columns (the last age column is changed to int to illustrate how it can be done).
Assuming the input data are in rdd:
val header = "name,account,state,age"
val df = rdd.map(row => row.split(","))
.map{ case Array(name, account, state, age) => (name, account, state, age.toInt)}
.toDF(header.split(","):_*)
Resulting dataframe:
+----+-----------+-----+---+
|name| account|state|age|
+----+-----------+-----+---+
|Mike|2222-003330| NY| 34|
|Kate|3333-544444| LA| 32|
|Abby|4444-234324| MA| 56|
+----+-----------+-----+---+