How to get the schema definition from a dataframe in PySpark?

Question

In PySpark it you can define a schema and read data sources with this pre-defined schema, e. g.:

Schema = StructType([ Str         


        

Answer 1

If you are looking for a DDL string from PySpark:

df: DataFrame = spark.read.load('LOCATION')
schema_json = df.schema.json()
ddl = spark.sparkContext._jvm.org.apache.spark.sql.types.DataType.fromJson(schema_json).toDDL()

Answer 2

The code below will give you a well formatted tabular schema definition of the known dataframe. Quite useful when you have very huge number of columns & where editing is cumbersome. You can then now apply it to your new dataframe & hand-edit any columns you may want to accordingly.

from pyspark.sql.types import StructType

schema = [i for i in df.schema] 

And then from here, you have your new schema:

NewSchema = StructType(schema)

Answer 3

You could re-use schema for existing Dataframe

l = [('Ankita',25,'F'),('Jalfaizy',22,'M'),('saurabh',20,'M'),('Bala',26,None)]
people_rdd=spark.sparkContext.parallelize(l)
schemaPeople = people_rdd.toDF(['name','age','gender'])

schemaPeople.show()

+--------+---+------+
|    name|age|gender|
+--------+---+------+
|  Ankita| 25|     F|
|Jalfaizy| 22|     M|
| saurabh| 20|     M|
|    Bala| 26|  null|
+--------+---+------+

spark.createDataFrame(people_rdd,schemaPeople.schema).show()

+--------+---+------+
|    name|age|gender|
+--------+---+------+
|  Ankita| 25|     F|
|Jalfaizy| 22|     M|
| saurabh| 20|     M|
|    Bala| 26|  null|
+--------+---+------+

Just use df.schema to get the underlying schema of dataframe

schemaPeople.schema

StructType(List(StructField(name,StringType,true),StructField(age,LongType,true),StructField(gender,StringType,true)))

Answer 4

Yes it is possible. Use DataFrame.schema property

schema

Returns the schema of this DataFrame as a pyspark.sql.types.StructType.

>>> df.schema
StructType(List(StructField(age,IntegerType,true),StructField(name,StringType,true)))

New in version 1.3.

Schema can be also exported to JSON and imported back if needed.