[FIXED] How do I skip a header from CSV files in Spark?

Issue

Suppose I give three files paths to a Spark context to read and each file has a schema in the first row. How can we skip schema lines from headers?

val rdd=sc.textFile("file1,file2,file3")

Now, how can we skip header lines from this rdd?

Solution

If there were just one header line in the first record, then the most efficient way to filter it out would be:

rdd.mapPartitionsWithIndex {
  (idx, iter) => if (idx == 0) iter.drop(1) else iter 
}

This doesn't help if of course there are many files with many header lines inside. You can union three RDDs you make this way, indeed.

You could also just write a filter that matches only a line that could be a header. This is quite simple, but less efficient.

Python equivalent:

from itertools import islice

rdd.mapPartitionsWithIndex(
    lambda idx, it: islice(it, 1, None) if idx == 0 else it 
)

Answered By - Sean Owen

Answer Checked By - Timothy Miller (PHPFixing Admin)