Dataframe to RDD[Row] replacing space with nulls - scala

Question

I am converting a Spark dataframe to RDD[Row] so I can map it to final schema to write into Hive Orc table. I want to convert any space in the input to actual null so the hive table can store actual null instead of a empty string.
Input DataFrame (a single column with pipe delimited values):
col1
1|2|3||5|6|7|||...|
My code:
inputDF.rdd.
map { x: Row => x.get(0).asInstanceOf[String].split("\\|", -1)}.
map { x => Row (nullConverter(x(0)),nullConverter(x(1)),nullConverter(x(2)).... nullConverter(x(200)))}
def nullConverter(input: String): String = {
if (input.trim.length > 0) input.trim
else null
}
Is there any clean way of doing it rather than calling the nullConverter function 200 times.

Answer 1

Update based on single column:
Going with your approach, I will do something like:
inputDf.rdd.map((row: Row) => {
val values = row.get(0).asInstanceOf[String].split("\\|").map(nullConverter)
Row(values)
})
Make your nullConverter or any other logic a udf:
import org.apache.spark.sql.functions._
val nullConverter = udf((input: String) => {
if (input.trim.length > 0) input.trim
else null
})
Now, use the udf on your df and apply to all columns:
val convertedDf = inputDf.select(inputDf.columns.map(c => nullConverter(col(c)).alias(c)):_*)
Now, you can do your RDD logic.

Answer 2

This would be easier to do using the DataFrame API before converting to an RDD. First, split the data:
val df = Seq(("1|2|3||5|6|7|8||")).toDF("col0") // Example dataframe
val df2 = df.withColumn("col0", split($"col0", "\\|")) // Split on "|"
Then find out the length of the array:
val numCols = df2.first.getAs[Seq[String]](0).length
Now, for each element in the array, use the nullConverter UDF and then assign it to it's own column.
val nullConverter = udf((input: String) => {
if (input.trim.length > 0) input.trim
else null
})
val df3 = df2.select((0 until numCols).map(i => nullConverter($"col0".getItem(i)).as("col" + i)): _*)
The result using the example dataframe:
+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+
|col0|col1|col2|col3|col4|col5|col6|col7|col8|col9|
+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+
| 1| 2| 3|null| 5| 6| 7| 8|null|null|
+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+
Now convert it to an RDD or continue using the data as a DataFrame depending on your needs.

Answer 3

There is no point in converting dataframe to rdd
import org.apache.spark.sql.functions._
df = sc.parallelize([
(1, "foo bar"), (2, "foobar "), (3, " ")
]).toDF(["k", "v"])
df.select(regexp_replace(col("*"), " ", "NULL"))