PySpark: How to judge column type of dataframe
TL;DR Use external data types (plain Python types) to test values, internal data types (DataType
subclasses) to test schema.
First and foremost - You should never use
type(123) == int
Correct way to check types in Python, which handles inheritance, is
isinstance(123, int)
Having this done, lets talk about
Basically I want to know the way to directly get the object of the class like IntegerType, StringType from the dataframe and then judge it.
This is not how it works. DataTypes
describe schema (internal representation) not values. External types, is a plain Python object, so if internal type is IntegerType
, then external types is int
and so on, according to the rules defined in the Spark SQL Programming guide.
The only place where IntegerType
(or other DataTypes
) instance exist is your schema:
from pyspark.sql.types import *
df = spark.createDataFrame([(1, "foo")])
isinstance(df.schema["_1"].dataType, LongType)
# True
isinstance(df.schema["_2"].dataType, StringType)
# True
_1, _2 = df.first()
isinstance(_1, int)
# True
isinstance(_2, str)
# True