Convert string to timestamp for Spark using Scala

Question

I have a dataframe called train, he has the following schema :

root
|-- date_time: string (nullable = true)
|-- site_name: integer (nullable = true)
|-- posa_continent: integer (nullable = true)

I want to cast the date_timecolumn to timestampand create a new column with the year value extracted from the date_timecolumn.

To be clear, I have the following dataframe :

+-------------------+---------+--------------+
|          date_time|site_name|posa_continent|
+-------------------+---------+--------------+
|2014-08-11 07:46:59|        2|             3|
|2014-08-11 08:22:12|        2|             3|
|2015-08-11 08:24:33|        2|             3|
|2016-08-09 18:05:16|        2|             3|
|2011-08-09 18:08:18|        2|             3|
|2009-08-09 18:13:12|        2|             3|
|2014-07-16 09:42:23|        2|             3|
+-------------------+---------+--------------+

I want to get the following dataframe :

+-------------------+---------+--------------+--------+
|          date_time|site_name|posa_continent|year    |
+-------------------+---------+--------------+--------+
|2014-08-11 07:46:59|        2|             3|2014    |
|2014-08-11 08:22:12|        2|             3|2014    |
|2015-08-11 08:24:33|        2|             3|2015    |
|2016-08-09 18:05:16|        2|             3|2016    |
|2011-08-09 18:08:18|        2|             3|2011    |
|2009-08-09 18:13:12|        2|             3|2009    |
|2014-07-16 09:42:23|        2|             3|2014    |
+-------------------+---------+--------------+--------+

Answer 1

Well, if you want to cast the date_timecolumn to timestampand create a new column with the year value then do exactly that:

import org.apache.spark.sql.functions.year

df
  .withColumn("date_time", $"date_time".cast("timestamp"))  // cast to timestamp
  .withColumn("year", year($"date_time"))  // add year column