How to create date from year, month and day in PySpark?

Question

I have three columns about year, month and day. How can I use these to create date in PySpark?

Answer 1

You can use concat_ws() to concat columns with - and cast to date.

#sampledata
df.show()

#+----+-----+---+
#|year|month|day|
#+----+-----+---+
#|2020|   12| 12|
#+----+-----+---+
from pyspark.sql.functions import *

df.withColumn("date",concat_ws("-",col("year"),col("month"),col("day")).cast("date")).show()
+----+-----+---+----------+
|year|month|day|      date|
+----+-----+---+----------+
|2020|   12| 12|2020-12-12|
+----+-----+---+----------+

#dynamic way
cols=["year","month","day"]
df.withColumn("date",concat_ws("-",*cols).cast("date")).show()
#+----+-----+---+----------+
#|year|month|day|      date|
#+----+-----+---+----------+
#|2020|   12| 12|2020-12-12|
#+----+-----+---+----------+

#using date_format,to_timestamp,from_unixtime(unix_timestamp) functions

df.withColumn("date",date_format(concat_ws("-",*cols),"yyyy-MM-dd").cast("date")).show()
df.withColumn("date",to_timestamp(concat_ws("-",*cols),"yyyy-MM-dd").cast("date")).show()
df.withColumn("date",to_date(concat_ws("-",*cols),"yyyy-MM-dd")).show()
df.withColumn("date",from_unixtime(unix_timestamp(concat_ws("-",*cols),"yyyy-MM-dd"),"yyyy-MM-dd").cast("date")).show()
#+----+-----+---+----------+
#|year|month|day|      date|
#+----+-----+---+----------+
#|2020|   12| 12|2020-12-12|
#+----+-----+---+----------+

Answer 2

For Spark 3+, you can use make_date function:

df = df.withColumn("date", expr("make_date(year, month, day)"))