Spark filter weird behaviour with space character '\xa0'

Question

I have a Delta dataframe containing multiple columns and rows.

I did the following:

Delta.limit(1).select("IdEpisode").show()

+---------+
|IdEpisode|
+---------+
|  287 860|
+---------+

But then, when I do this:

Delta.filter("IdEpisode == '287 860'").show()

It returns 0 rows which is weird because we can clearly see the Id present in the dataframe.

I figured it was about the ' ' in the middle but I don't see why it would be a problem and how to fix it.

IMPORTANT EDIT:

Doing Delta.limit(1).select("IdEpisode").collect()[0][0]

returned: '287\xa0860'

And then doing:

Delta.filter("IdEpisode == '287\xa0860'").show()

returned the rows I've been looking for. Any explanation ?

Answer 1

This character is called NO-BREAK SPACE. It's not a regular space that's why it is not matched with your filtering.

You can remove it using regexp_replace function before applying filter:

import pyspark.sql.functions as F

Delta = spark.createDataFrame([('287\xa0860',)], ['IdEpisode'])

# replace NBSP character with normal space in column 
Delta = Delta.withColumn("IdEpisode", F.regexp_replace("IdEpisode", '[\\u00A0]', ' '))

Delta.filter("IdEpisode = '287 860'").show()
    
#+---------+
#|IdEpisode|
#+---------+
#|  287 860|
#+---------+

You can also clean your column by using the regex \p{Z} to replace all kind of spaces with regular space:

\p{Z} or \p{Separator}: any kind of whitespace or invisible separator.

Delta = Delta.withColumn("IdEpisode", F.regexp_replace("IdEpisode", '\\p{Z}', ' '))