Pyspark: Parse a column of json strings

Question

I have a pyspark dataframe consisting of one column, called json, where each row is a unicode string of json. I\'d like to parse each row and return a new dataf

Answer 1

Converting a dataframe with json strings to structured dataframe is'a actually quite simple in spark if you convert the dataframe to RDD of strings before (see: http://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html#json-datasets)

For example:

>>> new_df = sql_context.read.json(df.rdd.map(lambda r: r.json))
>>> new_df.printSchema()
root
 |-- body: struct (nullable = true)
 |    |-- id: long (nullable = true)
 |    |-- name: string (nullable = true)
 |    |-- sub_json: struct (nullable = true)
 |    |    |-- id: long (nullable = true)
 |    |    |-- sub_sub_json: struct (nullable = true)
 |    |    |    |-- col1: long (nullable = true)
 |    |    |    |-- col2: string (nullable = true)
 |-- header: struct (nullable = true)
 |    |-- foo: string (nullable = true)
 |    |-- id: long (nullable = true)