PySpark: TypeError: condition should be string or Column

Question

I am trying to filter an RDD based like below:

spark_df = sc.createDataFrame(pandas_df)
spark_df.filter(lambda r: str(         


        

Answer 1

I have been through this and have settled to using a UDF:

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

filtered_df = spark_df.filter(udf(lambda target: target.startswith('good'), 
                                  BooleanType())(spark_df.target))

More readable would be to use a normal function definition instead of the lambda