r - How to filter on partial match using sparklyr

Question

I'm new to sparklyr (but familiar with spark and pyspark), and I've got a really basic question. I'm trying to filter a column based on a partial match. In dplyr, i'd write my operation as so:

businesses %>%
  filter(grepl('test', biz_name)) %>%
  head

Running that code on a spark dataframe however gives me:

Error: org.apache.spark.sql.AnalysisException: Undefined function: 'GREPL'. This function is neither a registered temporary function nor a permanent function registered in the database 'project_eftpos_failure'.; line 5 pos 7

Answer 1

The same as in standard Spark, you can use either rlike (Java regular expressions):

df <- copy_to(sc, iris) 

df %>% filter(rlike(Species, "osa"))

# or anchored
df %>% filter(rlike(Species, "^.*osa.*$"))

or like (simple SQL regular expressions):

df %>% filter(like(Species, "%osa%"))

Both methods can be also used with suffix notation as

df %>% filter(Species %rlike%  "^.*osa.*$")

and

df %>% filter(Species %like% "%osa%")

respectively.

For details see vignette("sql-translation").