How to write the resulting RDD to a csv file in Spark python

It's not good to just join by commas because if fields contain commas, they won't be properly quoted, e.g. ','.join(['a', 'b', '1,2,3', 'c']) gives you a,b,1,2,3,c when you'd want a,b,"1,2,3",c. Instead, you should use Python's csv module to convert each list in the RDD to a properly-formatted csv string:

# python 3
import csv, io

def list_to_csv_str(x):
    """Given a list of strings, returns a properly-csv-formatted string."""
    output = io.StringIO("")
    csv.writer(output).writerow(x)
    return output.getvalue().strip() # remove extra newline

# ... do stuff with your rdd ...
rdd = rdd.map(list_to_csv_str)
rdd.saveAsTextFile("output_directory")

Since the csv module only writes to file objects, we have to create an empty "file" with io.StringIO("") and tell the csv.writer to write the csv-formatted string into it. Then, we use output.getvalue() to get the string we just wrote to the "file". To make this code work with Python 2, just replace io with the StringIO module.

If you're using the Spark DataFrames API, you can also look into the DataBricks save function, which has a csv format.

Just map the lines of the RDD (labelsAndPredictions) into strings (the lines of the CSV) then use rdd.saveAsTextFile().

def toCSVLine(data):
  return ','.join(str(d) for d in data)

lines = labelsAndPredictions.map(toCSVLine)
lines.saveAsTextFile('hdfs://my-node:9000/tmp/labels-and-predictions.csv')

I know this is an old post. But to help someone searching for the same, here's how I write a two column RDD to a single CSV file in PySpark 1.6.2

The RDD:

>>> rdd.take(5)
[(73342, u'cells'), (62861, u'cell'), (61714, u'studies'), (61377, u'aim'), (60168, u'clinical')]

Now the code:

# First I convert the RDD to dataframe
from pyspark import SparkContext
df = sqlContext.createDataFrame(rdd, ['count', 'word'])

The DF:

>>> df.show()
+-----+-----------+
|count|       word|
+-----+-----------+
|73342|      cells|
|62861|       cell|
|61714|    studies|
|61377|        aim|
|60168|   clinical|
|59275|          2|
|59221|          1|
|58274|       data|
|58087|development|
|56579|     cancer|
|50243|    disease|
|49817|   provided|
|49216|   specific|
|48857|     health|
|48536|      study|
|47827|    project|
|45573|description|
|45455|  applicant|
|44739|    program|
|44522|   patients|
+-----+-----------+
only showing top 20 rows

Now write to CSV

# Write CSV (I have HDFS storage)
df.coalesce(1).write.format('com.databricks.spark.csv').options(header='true').save('file:///home/username/csv_out')

P.S: I am just a beginner learning from posts here in Stackoverflow. So I don't know whether this is the best way. But it worked for me and I hope it will help someone!