Spark 2.0.x dump a csv file from a dataframe containing one array of type string

Question

I have a dataframe df that contains one column of type array

df.show() looks like

|ID|ArrayOfString|Age|Gender|
+--+-------         


        

Answer 1

Pyspark implementation.

In this example, change the field column_as_array to column_as_string before saving.

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

def array_to_string(my_list):
    return '[' + ','.join([str(elem) for elem in my_list]) + ']'

array_to_string_udf = udf(array_to_string, StringType())

df = df.withColumn('column_as_str', array_to_string_udf(df["column_as_array"]))

Then you can drop the old column (array type) before saving.

df.drop("column_as_array").write.csv(...)