Spark - load numbers from a CSV file with non-US number format - csv

Question

I have a CSV file which I want to convert to Parquet for futher processing. Using
sqlContext.read()
.format("com.databricks.spark.csv")
.schema(schema)
.option("delimiter",";")
.(other options...)
.load(...)
.write()
.parquet(...)
works fine when my schema contains only Strings. However, some of the fields are numbers that I'd like to be able to store as numbers.
The problem is that the file arrives not as an actual "csv" but semicolon delimited file, and the numbers are formatted with German notation, i.e. comma is used as decimal delimiter.
For example, what in US would be 123.01 in this file would be stored as 123,01
Is there a way to force reading the numbers in different Locale or some other workaround that would allow me to convert this file without first converting the CSV file to a different format? I looked in Spark code and one nasty thing that seems to be causing issue is in CSVInferSchema.scala line 268 (spark 2.1.0) - the parser enforces US formatting rather than e.g. rely on the Locale set for the JVM, or allowing configuring this somehow.
I thought of using UDT but got nowhere with that - I can't work out how to get it to let me handle the parsing myself (couldn't really find a good example of using UDT...)
Any suggestions on a way of achieving this directly, i.e. on parsing step, or will I be forced to do intermediate conversion and only then convert it into parquet?

Answer 1

For anybody else who might be looking for answer - the workaround I went with (in Java) for now is:
JavaRDD<Row> convertedRDD = sqlContext.read()
.format("com.databricks.spark.csv")
.schema(stringOnlySchema)
.option("delimiter",";")
.(other options...)
.load(...)
.javaRDD()
.map ( this::conversionFunction );
sqlContext.createDataFrame(convertedRDD, schemaWithNumbers).write().parquet(...);
The conversion function takes a Row and needs to return a new Row with fields converted to numerical values as appropriate (or, in fact, this could perform any conversion). Rows in Java can be created by RowFactory.create(newFields).
I'd be happy to hear any other suggestions how to approach this but for now this works. :)