Load CSV file with Spark

Question

Spark 2.0.0+

You can use built-in csv data source directly:

spark.read.csv(
    "some_input_file.csv", 
    header=True, 
    mode="DROPMALFORMED", 
    schema=schema
)

or

(
    spark.read
    .schema(schema)
    .option("header", "true")
    .option("mode", "DROPMALFORMED")
    .csv("some_input_file.csv")
)

without including any external dependencies.

Spark < 2.0.0:

Instead of manual parsing, which is far from trivial in a general case, I would recommend spark-csv:

Make sure that Spark CSV is included in the path (--packages, --jars, --driver-class-path)

And load your data as follows:

df = (
    sqlContext
    .read.format("com.databricks.spark.csv")
    .option("header", "true")
    .option("inferschema", "true")
    .option("mode", "DROPMALFORMED")
    .load("some_input_file.csv")
)

It can handle loading, schema inference, dropping malformed lines and doesn't require passing data from Python to the JVM.

Note:

If you know the schema, it is better to avoid schema inference and pass it to DataFrameReader. Assuming you have three columns - integer, double and string:

from pyspark.sql.types import StructType, StructField
from pyspark.sql.types import DoubleType, IntegerType, StringType

schema = StructType([
    StructField("A", IntegerType()),
    StructField("B", DoubleType()),
    StructField("C", StringType())
])

(
    sqlContext
    .read
    .format("com.databricks.spark.csv")
    .schema(schema)
    .option("header", "true")
    .option("mode", "DROPMALFORMED")
    .load("some_input_file.csv")
)

Are you sure that all the lines have at least 2 columns? Can you try something like, just to check?:

sc.textFile("file.csv") \
    .map(lambda line: line.split(",")) \
    .filter(lambda line: len(line)>1) \
    .map(lambda line: (line[0],line[1])) \
    .collect()

Alternatively, you could print the culprit (if any):

sc.textFile("file.csv") \
    .map(lambda line: line.split(",")) \
    .filter(lambda line: len(line)<=1) \
    .collect()

from pyspark.sql import SparkSession

spark = SparkSession \
    .builder \
    .appName("Python Spark SQL basic example") \
    .config("spark.some.config.option", "some-value") \
    .getOrCreate()

df = spark.read.csv("/home/stp/test1.csv",header=True,sep="|")

print(df.collect())

And yet another option which consist in reading the CSV file using Pandas and then importing the Pandas DataFrame into Spark.

For example:

from pyspark import SparkContext
from pyspark.sql import SQLContext
import pandas as pd

sc = SparkContext('local','example')  # if using locally
sql_sc = SQLContext(sc)

pandas_df = pd.read_csv('file.csv')  # assuming the file contains a header
# pandas_df = pd.read_csv('file.csv', names = ['column 1','column 2']) # if no header
s_df = sql_sc.createDataFrame(pandas_df)