How to parse a csv that uses ^A (i.e. \001) as the delimiter with spark-csv?

Question

Terribly new to spark and hive and big data and scala and all. I'm trying to write a simple function that takes an sqlContext, loads a csv file from s3 and returns a DataFrame. The problem is that this particular csv uses the ^A (i.e. \001) character as the delimiter and the dataset is huge so I can't just do a "s/\001/,/g" on it. Besides, the fields might contain commas or other characters I might use as a delimiter.

I know that the spark-csv package that I'm using has a delimiter option, but I don't know how to set it so that it will read \001 as one character and not something like an escaped 0, 0 and 1. Perhaps I should use hiveContext or something?

Answer 1

If you check the GitHub page, there is a delimiter parameter for spark-csv (as you also noted). Use it like this:

val df = sqlContext.read
    .format("com.databricks.spark.csv")
    .option("header", "true") // Use first line of all files as header
    .option("inferSchema", "true") // Automatically infer data types
    .option("delimiter", "\u0001")
    .load("cars.csv")