How to force fromJSON from jsonlite to read numbers as characters - json

I have a bunch of keys in a JSON file that are defined by numbers like 8374829806766627074.
When I try to read them in R I get completely different numbers. For instance, 8374829806766627074 becomes 8374829806766626816.
I am using the fromJSON in the jsonlite package to read a json file from citrix api.
How can I instead adjust the function to read numbers as characters. I seem to fail finding a solution.
Thanks in advance!

Related

How do I read a Large JSON Array File in PySpark

Issue
I recently encountered a challenge in Azure Data Lake Analytics when I attempted to read in a Large UTF-8 JSON Array file and switched to HDInsight PySpark (v2.x, not 3) to process the file. The file is ~110G and has ~150m JSON Objects.
HDInsight PySpark does not appear to support Array of JSON file format for input, so I'm stuck. Also, I have "many" such files with different schemas in each containing hundred of columns each, so creating the schemas for those is not an option at this point.
Question
How do I use out-of-the-box functionality in PySpark 2 on HDInsight to enable these files to be read as JSON?
Thanks,
J
Things I tried
I used the approach at the bottom of this page:
from Databricks that supplied the below code snippet:
import json
df = sc.wholeTextFiles('/tmp/*.json').flatMap(lambda x: json.loads(x[1])).toDF()
display(df)
I tried the above, not understanding how "wholeTextFiles" works, and of course ran into OutOfMemory errors that killed my executors quickly.
I attempted loading to an RDD and other open methods, but PySpark appears to support only the JSONLines JSON file format, and I have the Array of JSON Objects due to ADLA's requirement for that file format.
I tried reading in as a text file, stripping Array characters, splitting on the JSON object boundaries and converting to JSON like the above, but that kept giving errors about being unable to convert unicode and/or str (ings).
I found a way through the above, and converted to a dataframe containing one column with Rows of strings that were the JSON Objects. However, I did not find a way to output only the JSON Strings from the data frame rows to an output file by themselves. The always came out as
{'dfColumnName':'{...json_string_as_value}'}
I also tried a map function that accepted the above rows, parsed as JSON, extracted the values (JSON I wanted), then parsed the values as JSON. This appeared to work, but when I would try to save, the RDD was type PipelineRDD and had no saveAsTextFile() method. I then tried the toJSON method, but kept getting errors about "found no valid JSON Object", which I did not understand admittedly, and of course other conversion errors.
I finally found a way forward. I learned that I could read json directly from an RDD, including a PipelineRDD. I found a way to remove the unicode byte order header, wrapping array square brackets, split the JSON Objects based on a fortunate delimiter, and have a distributed dataset for more efficient processing. The output dataframe now had columns named after the JSON elements, inferred the schema, and dynamically adapts for other file formats.
Here is the code - hope it helps!:
#...Spark considers arrays of Json objects to be an invalid format
# and unicode files are prefixed with a byteorder marker
#
thanksMoiraRDD = sc.textFile( '/a/valid/file/path', partitions ).map(
lambda x: x.encode('utf-8','ignore').strip(u",\r\n[]\ufeff")
)
df = sqlContext.read.json(thanksMoiraRDD)

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

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?
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. :)

Library to convert JSON string to Erlang record

I've a large JSON string, I want to convert this string into Erlang record.
I found jiffy library but it doesn't completely convert to record.
For example:
jiffy:decode(<<"{\"foo\":\"bar\"}">>).
gives
{[{<<"foo">>,<<"bar">>}]}
but I want the following output:
{ok,{obj,[{"foo",<<"bar">>}]},[]}
Is there any library that can be used for the desired output?
Or is there any library that can be used in combination of jiffy for further modifying the output of it.
Consider the fact the JSON string is large, and I want the output is minimum time.
Take a look at ejson, from the documentation:
JSON library for Erlang on top of jsx. It gives a declarative interface for jsx by which we need to specify conversion rules and ejson will convert tuples according to the rules.
I made this library to make easy not just the encoding but rather the decoding of JSONs to Erlang records...
In order for ejson to take effect the source files need to be compiled with parse_transform ejson_trans. All record which has -json attribute can be converted to JSON later.

Read a Text File into R

I apologize if this has been asked previously, but I haven't been able to find an example online or elsewhere.
I have very dirty data file in a text file (it may be JSON). I want to analyze the data in R, and since I am still new to the language, I want to read in the raw data and manipulate as needed from there.
How would I go about reading in JSON from a text file on my machine? Additionally, if it isn't JSON, how can I read in the raw data as is (not parsed into columns, etc.) so I can go ahead and figure out how to parse it as needed?
Thanks in advance!
Use the rjson package. In particular, look at the fromJSON function in the documentation.
If you want further pointers, then search for rjson at the R Bloggers website.
If you want to use the packages related to JSON in R, there are a number of other posts on SO answering this. I presume you searched on JSON [r] already on this site, plenty of info there.
If you just want to read in the text file line by line and process later on, then you can use either scan() or readLines(). They appear to do the same thing, but there's an important difference between them.
scan() lets you define what kind of objects you want to find, how many, and so on. Read the help file for more info. You can use scan to read in every word/number/sign as element of a vector using eg scan(filename,""). You can also use specific delimiters to separate the data. See also the examples in the help files.
To read line by line, you use readLines(filename) or scan(filename,"",sep="\n"). It gives you a vector with the lines of the file as elements. This again allows you to do custom processing of the text. Then again, if you really have to do this often, you might want to consider doing this in Perl.
Suppose your file is in JSON format, you may try the packages jsonlite ou RJSONIO or rjson. These three package allows you to use the function fromJSON.
To install a package you use the install.packages function. For example:
install.packages("jsonlite")
And, whenever the package is installed, you can load using the function library.
library(jsonlite)
Generally, the line-delimited JSON has one object per line. So, you need to read line by line and collecting the objects. For example:
con <- file('myBigJsonFile.json')
open(con)
objects <- list()
index <- 1
while (length(line <- readLines(con, n = 1, warn = FALSE)) > 0) {
objects[[index]] <- fromJSON(line)
index <- index + 1
}
close(con)
After that, you have all the data in the objects variable. With that variable you may extract the information you want.

Reading JSON arrays from R

Then I read JSON files from R using rjson it seems that JSON arrays (enclosed with []) are converted to (unnamed) R lists, not vectors.
Therefore I have to first unlist(recuresice=F) each of those lists before I can work with them.
Is there any logic behind this
conversion I am missing? I mean, why
use a list (and not a vector) to
store an array?
Is there any way to
control this behavior of rjson (or
perhaps another recommended JSON
parser for R)?
JSON arrays can store values of different types, so they are equivalent to R unnamed lists.