Opening a json column as a string in pyspark schema and working with it - json

Question

I have a big dataframe I cannot infer the schema from. I have a column that could be read as if each value is a json format, but I cannot know the full detail of it (i.e. the keys and values can vary and I do not know what it can be).
I want to read it as a string and work with it, but the format changes in a strange way in the process ; here is an example:
from pyspark.sql.types import *
data = [{"ID": 1, "Value": {"a":12, "b": "test"}},
{"ID": 2, "Value": {"a":13, "b": "test2"}}
]
df = spark.createDataFrame(data)
#change my schema to open the column as string
schema = df.schema
j = schema.jsonValue()
j["fields"][1] = {"name": "Value", "type": "string", "nullable": True, "metadata": {}}
new_schema = StructType.fromJson(j)
df2 = spark.createDataFrame(data, schema=new_schema)
df2.show()
Gives me
+---+---------------+
| ID| Value|
+---+---------------+
| 1| {a=12, b=test}|
| 2|{a=13, b=test2}|
+---+---------------+
As one can see, the format in column Value is now without quotes, and with = instead of : and I cannot work properly with it anymore.
How can I turn that back into a StructType or MapType ?

Answer 1

Assuming this is your input dataframe:
df2 = spark.createDataFrame([
(1, "{a=12, b=test}"), (2, "{a=13, b=test2}")
], ["ID", "Value"])
You can use str_to_map function after removing {} from the string column like this:
from pyspark.sql import functions as F
df = df2.withColumn(
"Value",
F.regexp_replace("Value", "[{}]", "")
).withColumn(
"Value",
F.expr("str_to_map(Value, ', ', '=')")
)
df.printSchema()
#root
# |-- ID: long (nullable = true)
# |-- Value: map (nullable = true)
# | |-- key: string
# | |-- value: string (valueContainsNull = true)
df.show()
#+---+---------------------+
#|ID |Value |
#+---+---------------------+
#|1 |{a -> 12, b -> test} |
#|2 |{a -> 13, b -> test2}|
#+---+---------------------+