PySpark: withColumn() with two conditions and three outcomes

Question

There are a few efficient ways to implement this. Let's start with required imports:

from pyspark.sql.functions import col, expr, when

You can use Hive IF function inside expr:

new_column_1 = expr(
    """IF(fruit1 IS NULL OR fruit2 IS NULL, 3, IF(fruit1 = fruit2, 1, 0))"""
)

or when + otherwise:

new_column_2 = when(
    col("fruit1").isNull() | col("fruit2").isNull(), 3
).when(col("fruit1") == col("fruit2"), 1).otherwise(0)

Finally you could use following trick:

from pyspark.sql.functions import coalesce, lit

new_column_3 = coalesce((col("fruit1") == col("fruit2")).cast("int"), lit(3))

With example data:

df = sc.parallelize([
    ("orange", "apple"), ("kiwi", None), (None, "banana"), 
    ("mango", "mango"), (None, None)
]).toDF(["fruit1", "fruit2"])

you can use this as follows:

(df
    .withColumn("new_column_1", new_column_1)
    .withColumn("new_column_2", new_column_2)
    .withColumn("new_column_3", new_column_3))

and the result is:

+------+------+------------+------------+------------+
|fruit1|fruit2|new_column_1|new_column_2|new_column_3|
+------+------+------------+------------+------------+
|orange| apple|           0|           0|           0|
|  kiwi|  null|           3|           3|           3|
|  null|banana|           3|           3|           3|
| mango| mango|           1|           1|           1|
|  null|  null|           3|           3|           3|
+------+------+------------+------------+------------+

You'll want to use a udf as below

from pyspark.sql.types import IntegerType
from pyspark.sql.functions import udf

def func(fruit1, fruit2):
    if fruit1 == None or fruit2 == None:
        return 3
    if fruit1 == fruit2:
        return 1
    return 0

func_udf = udf(func, IntegerType())
df = df.withColumn('new_column',func_udf(df['fruit1'], df['fruit2']))

The withColumn function in pyspark enables you to make a new variable with conditions, add in the when and otherwise functions and you have a properly working if then else structure.

For all of this you would need to import the sparksql functions, as you will see that the following bit of code will not work without the col() function.

In the first bit, we declare a new column -'new column', and then give the condition enclosed in when function (i.e. fruit1==fruit2) then give 1 if the condition is true, if untrue the control goes to the otherwise which then takes care of the second condition (fruit1 or fruit2 is Null) with the isNull() function and if true 3 is returned and if false, the otherwise is checked again giving 0 as the answer.

from pyspark.sql import functions as F

df=df.withColumn('new_column', 
    F.when(F.col('fruit1')==F.col('fruit2'), 1)
    .otherwise(F.when((F.col('fruit1').isNull()) | (F.col('fruit2').isNull()), 3))
    .otherwise(0))