Explode in PySpark

explode and split are SQL functions. Both operate on SQL Column. split takes a Java regular expression as a second argument. If you want to separate data on arbitrary whitespace you'll need something like this:

df = sqlContext.createDataFrame(
    [('cat \n\n elephant rat \n rat cat', )], ['word']
)

df.select(explode(split(col("word"), "\s+")).alias("word")).show()

## +--------+
## |    word|
## +--------+
## |     cat|
## |elephant|
## |     rat|
## |     rat|
## |     cat|
## +--------+

To split on whitespace and also remove blank lines, add the where clause.

DF = sqlContext.createDataFrame([('cat \n\n elephant rat \n rat cat\nmat\n', )], ['word'])

>>> (DF.select(explode(split(DF.word, "\s")).alias("word"))
       .where('word != ""')
       .show())

+--------+
|    word|
+--------+
|     cat|
|elephant|
|     rat|
|     rat|
|     cat|
|     mat|
+--------+