Spark SQL converting string to timestamp

Question

I'm new to Spark SQL and am trying to convert a string to a timestamp in a spark data frame. I have a string that looks like '2017-08-01T02:26:59.000Z' in a column called time_string

My code to convert this string to timestamp is

CAST (time_string AS Timestamp)

But this gives me a timestamp of 2017-07-31 19:26:59

Why is it changing the time? Is there a way to do this without changing the time?

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

You could use unix_timestamp function to convert the utc formatted date to timestamp

val df2 = Seq(("a3fac", "2017-08-01T02:26:59.000Z")).toDF("id", "eventTime")

df2.withColumn("eventTime1", unix_timestamp($"eventTime", "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSS'Z'").cast(TimestampType))

Output:

+-------------+---------------------+
|userid       |eventTime            |
+-------------+---------------------+
|a3fac        |2017-08-01 02:26:59.0|
+-------------+---------------------+

Hope this helps!