Pyspark replace strings in Spark dataframe column

For Spark 1.5 or later, you can use the functions package:

from pyspark.sql.functions import *
newDf = df.withColumn('address', regexp_replace('address', 'lane', 'ln'))

Quick explanation:

• The function withColumn is called to add (or replace, if the name exists) a column to the data frame.
• The function regexp_replace will generate a new column by replacing all substrings that match the pattern.

For scala

import org.apache.spark.sql.functions.regexp_replace
import org.apache.spark.sql.functions.col
data.withColumn("addr_new", regexp_replace(col("addr_line"), "\\*", ""))