Delete or Remove Columns from PySpark DataFrame

This article shows how to 'delete' column from Spark data frame using Python. 

Construct a dataframe 

Follow article Convert Python Dictionary List to PySpark DataFrame to construct a dataframe.

+----------+---+------+
|  Category| ID| Value|
+----------+---+------+
|Category A|  1| 12.40|
|Category B|  2| 30.10|
|Category C|  3|100.01|
+----------+---+------+

'Delete' or 'Remove' one column

The word 'delete' or 'remove' can be misleading as Spark is lazy evaluated. 

We can use drop function to remove or delete columns from a DataFrame.

df1 = df.drop('Category')
df1.show()

Output:

+---+------+
| ID| Value|
+---+------+
|  1| 12.40|
|  2| 30.10|
|  3|100.01|
+---+------+

Drop multiple columns

Multiple columns can be dropped at the same time:

df2 = df.drop('Category', 'ID')
df2.show()

columns_to_drop = ['Category', 'ID']
df3 = df.drop(*columns_to_drop)
df3.show()

+------+
| Value|
+------+
| 12.40|
| 30.10|
|100.01|
+------+

+------+
| Value|
+------+
| 12.40|
| 30.10|
|100.01|
+------+

Run Spark code

You can easily run Spark code on your Windows or UNIX-alike (Linux, MacOS) systems. Follow these articles to setup your Spark environment if you don't have one yet:

• Install Apache Spark 3.0.0 on Windows 10
• Apache Spark 3.0.0 Installation on Linux Guide