Spark Read CSV file into DataFrame

Spark SQL provides spark.read.csv("path") to read a CSV file into Spark DataFrame and dataframe.write.csv("path") to save or write to the CSV file. Spark supports reading pipe, comma, tab, or any other delimiter/seperator files.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to read a single file, multiple files, all files from a local directory into DataFrame, and applying some transformations finally writing DataFrame back to CSV file using Scala.

Note: Spark out of the box supports to read files in CSV, JSON, TEXT, Parquet, and many more file formats into Spark DataFrame. 

Table of contents:

• Spark Read CSV file into DataFrame
  • Read multiple CSV files
  • Read all CSV files in a directory
• Options while reading CSV file
  • delimiter
  • InferSchema
  • header
  • quotes
  • nullValues
  • dateFormat
• Read CSV files with a user-specified schema
• Applying DataFrame transformations
• Write DataFrame to CSV file
  • Using options 
  • Saving Mode

Spark Read CSV file into DataFrame

Using spark.read.csv("path") or spark.read.format("csv").load("path") you can read a CSV file with fields delimited by pipe, comma, tab (and many more) into a Spark DataFrame, These methods take a file path to read from as an argument. You can find the zipcodes.csv at GitHub

 
val df = spark.read.csv("src/main/resources/zipcodes.csv")
    df.printSchema()

This example reads the data into DataFrame columns “_c0” for the first column and “_c1” for second and so on. and by default type of all these columns would be String.

 
root
 |-- _c0: string (nullable = true)
 |-- _c1: string (nullable = true)
 |-- _c2: string (nullable = true)

If you have a header with column names on file, you need to explicitly specify true for header option using option("header",true) not mentioning this, the API treats the header as a data record.

 
val df = spark.read.option("header",true)
   .csv("src/main/resources/zipcodes.csv")

It also reads all columns as a string (StringType) by default. I will explain in later sections how to read the schema (inferschema) from the header record and derive the column type based on the data.

When you use format("csv") method, you can also specify the Data sources by their fully qualified name (i.e., org.apache.spark.sql.csv), but for built-in sources, you can also use their short names (csv,json, parquet, jdbc, text e.t.c). 

Read multiple CSV files

Using the spark.read.csv() method you can also read multiple CSV files, just pass all file names by separating comma as a path, for example : 

 
val df = spark.read.csv("path1,path2,path3")

Read all CSV files in a directory

 We can read all CSV files from a directory into DataFrame just by passing the directory as a path to the csv() method.

 
val df = spark.read.csv("Folder path")

Options while reading CSV file

Spark CSV dataset provides multiple options to work with CSV files. Below are some of the most important options explained with examples.

delimiter

delimiter option is used to specify the column delimiter of the CSV file. By default, it is comma (,) character, but can be set to pipe (|), tab, space, or any character using this option.

 
val df2 = spark.read.options(Map("delimiter"->","))
  .csv("src/main/resources/zipcodes.csv")

inferSchema

The default value set to this option is false when setting to true it automatically infers column types based on the data. Note that, it requires reading the data one more time to infer the schema.

 
val df2 = spark.read.options(Map("inferSchema"->"true","delimiter"->","))
  .csv("src/main/resources/zipcodes.csv")

header

This option is used to read the first line of the CSV file as column names. By default the value of this option is false , and all column types are assumed to be a string.

 
val df2 = spark.read.options(Map("inferSchema"->"true","delimiter"->",","header"->"true"))
  .csv("src/main/resources/zipcodes.csv")

quotes

When you have a column with a delimiter that used to split the columns, use quotes option to specify the quote character, by default it is ” and delimiters inside quotes are ignored. but using this option you can set any character.

nullValues

Using nullValues option you can specify the string in a CSV to consider as null. For example, if you want to consider a date column with a value “1900-01-01” set null on DataFrame.

dateFormat

dateFormat option to used to set the format of the input DateType and TimestampType columns. Supports all java.text.SimpleDateFormat formats.

Note: Besides the above options, Spark CSV dataset also supports many other options, please refer to this article for details.

Reading CSV files with a user-specified custom schema

If you know the schema of the file ahead and do not want to use the inferSchema option for column names and types, use user-defined custom column names and type using schema option.

 
val schema = new StructType()
      .add("RecordNumber",IntegerType,true)
      .add("Zipcode",IntegerType,true)
      .add("ZipCodeType",StringType,true)
      .add("City",StringType,true)
      .add("State",StringType,true)
      .add("LocationType",StringType,true)
      .add("Lat",DoubleType,true)
      .add("Long",DoubleType,true)
      .add("Xaxis",IntegerType,true)
      .add("Yaxis",DoubleType,true)
      .add("Zaxis",DoubleType,true)
      .add("WorldRegion",StringType,true)
      .add("Country",StringType,true)
      .add("LocationText",StringType,true)
      .add("Location",StringType,true)
      .add("Decommisioned",BooleanType,true)
      .add("TaxReturnsFiled",StringType,true)
      .add("EstimatedPopulation",IntegerType,true)
      .add("TotalWages",IntegerType,true)
      .add("Notes",StringType,true)
val df_with_schema = spark.read.format("csv")
      .option("header", "true")
      .schema(schema)
      .load("src/main/resources/zipcodes.csv")
df_with_schema.printSchema()
df_with_schema.show(false)

Applying DataFrame transformations

Once you have created DataFrame from the CSV file, you can apply all transformation and actions DataFrame support. Please refer to the link for more details. 

Write Spark DataFrame to CSV file

Use the write() method of the Spark DataFrameWriter object to write Spark DataFrame to a CSV file. For detailed example refer to Writing Spark DataFrame to CSV File using Options.

 
df2.write.option("header","true")
 .csv("/tmp/spark_output/zipcodes")

Options

While writing a CSV file you can use several options. for example, header to output the DataFrame column names as header record and delimiter to specify the delimiter on the CSV output file.

 
df2.write.options("header",true)
 .csv("/tmp/spark_output/zipcodes")
 

Other options available quote,escape,nullValue,dateFormat,quoteMode .

Saving modes

Spark DataFrameWriter also has a method mode() to specify SaveMode; the argument to this method either takes below string or a constant from SaveMode class.

overwrite – mode is used to overwrite the existing file, alternatively, you can use SaveMode.Overwrite.

append – To add the data to the existing file, alternatively, you can use SaveMode.Append.

ignore – Ignores write operation when the file already exists, alternatively you can use SaveMode.Ignore.

errorifexists or error – This is a default option when the file already exists, it returns an error, alternatively, you can use SaveMode.ErrorIfExists.

 
df2.write.mode(SaveMode.Overwrite).csv("/tmp/spark_output/zipcodes")

Conclusion:

In this tutorial, you have learned how to read a CSV file, multiple csv files and all files from a local folder into Spark DataFrame, using multiple options to change the default behavior and write CSV files back to DataFrame using different save options.

Related Articles

• Spark Read multiline (multiple line) CSV File
• Spark Read Files from HDFS (TXT, CSV, AVRO, PARQUET, JSON)
• Spark Read JSON from multiline
• Spark Read JSON from a CSV file
• Spark Write DataFrame to CSV File
• Spark Save a File without a Directory
• Spark Convert CSV to Avro, Parquet & JSON
• Write & Read CSV file from S3 into DataFrame

References:

• Databricks read CSV
• Spark CSV library

Happy Learning !!