pyspark: drop columns that have same values in all rows

Question

Related question: How to drop columns which have same values in all rows via pandas or spark dataframe?

So I have a pyspark dataframe, and I want to drop the columns

Answer 1

You can apply the countDistinct() aggregation function on each column to get count of distinct values per column. Column with count=1 means it has only 1 value in all rows.

# apply countDistinct on each column
col_counts = df.agg(*(countDistinct(col(c)).alias(c) for c in df.columns)).collect()[0].asDict()

# select the cols with count=1 in an array
cols_to_drop = [col for col in df.columns if col_counts[col] == 1 ]

# drop the selected column
df.drop(*cols_to_drop).show()