How to read multiple text files into a single RDD?

Question

You can specify whole directories, use wildcards and even CSV of directories and wildcards. E.g.:

sc.textFile("/my/dir1,/my/paths/part-00[0-5]*,/another/dir,/a/specific/file")

As Nick Chammas points out this is an exposure of Hadoop's FileInputFormat and therefore this also works with Hadoop (and Scalding).

Use union as follows:

val sc = new SparkContext(...)
val r1 = sc.textFile("xxx1")
val r2 = sc.textFile("xxx2")
...
val rdds = Seq(r1, r2, ...)
val bigRdd = sc.union(rdds)

Then the bigRdd is the RDD with all files.

You can use a single textFile call to read multiple files. Scala:

sc.textFile(','.join(files)) 

You can use this

First You can get a Buffer/List of S3 Paths :

import scala.collection.JavaConverters._
import java.util.ArrayList
import com.amazonaws.services.s3.AmazonS3Client
import com.amazonaws.services.s3.model.ObjectListing
import com.amazonaws.services.s3.model.S3ObjectSummary
import com.amazonaws.services.s3.model.ListObjectsRequest

def listFiles(s3_bucket:String, base_prefix : String) = {
    var files = new ArrayList[String]

    //S3 Client and List Object Request
    var s3Client = new AmazonS3Client();
    var objectListing: ObjectListing = null;
    var listObjectsRequest = new ListObjectsRequest();

    //Your S3 Bucket
    listObjectsRequest.setBucketName(s3_bucket)

    //Your Folder path or Prefix
    listObjectsRequest.setPrefix(base_prefix)

    //Adding s3:// to the paths and adding to a list
    do {
      objectListing = s3Client.listObjects(listObjectsRequest);
      for (objectSummary <- objectListing.getObjectSummaries().asScala) {
        files.add("s3://" + s3_bucket + "/" + objectSummary.getKey());
      }
      listObjectsRequest.setMarker(objectListing.getNextMarker());
    } while (objectListing.isTruncated());

    //Removing Base Directory Name
    files.remove(0)

    //Creating a Scala List for same
    files.asScala
  }

Now Pass this List object to the following piece of code, note : sc is an object of SQLContext

var df: DataFrame = null;
  for (file <- files) {
    val fileDf= sc.textFile(file)
    if (df!= null) {
      df= df.unionAll(fileDf)
    } else {
      df= fileDf
    }
  }

Now you got a final Unified RDD i.e. df

Optional, And You can also repartition it in a single BigRDD

val files = sc.textFile(filename, 1).repartition(1)

Repartitioning always works :D