Filter spark DataFrame on string contains

Question

I am using Spark 1.3.0 and Spark Avro 1.0.0. I am working from the example on the repository page. This following code works well

val df = sqlContext.read.avro("src/test/resources/episodes.avro") df.filter("doctor > 5").write.avro("/tmp/output") 

But what if I needed to see if the doctor string contains a substring? Since we are writing our expression inside of a string. What do I do to do a "contains"?

Answer 1

You can use contains (this works with an arbitrary sequence):

df.filter($"foo".contains("bar")) 

like (SQL like with SQL simple regular expression whith _ matching an arbitrary character and % matching an arbitrary sequence):

df.filter($"foo".like("bar")) 

or rlike (like with Java regular expressions):

df.filter($"foo".rlike("bar")) 

depending on your requirements. LIKE and RLIKE should work with SQL expressions as well.

Answer 2

In pyspark,SparkSql syntax:

where column_n like 'xyz%' 

might not work.

Use:

where column_n RLIKE '^xyz'  

This works perfectly fine.