topic Re: write file as csv format in Data Engineering

write file as csv format

pop_smoke — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 12:09:34 GMT

Is there any simple pyspark syntax to write data in csv format into a file or anywhere in free edition of databrick? in community edition , it was so easy

Re: write file as csv format

BS_THE_ANALYST — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 12:45:53 GMT

@pop_smoke a typical solution would be to store the .csvs in a Volume within your Unity Catalog in the Free Edition

Here's an example:

Syntax used for writing
One Example:

df.write.format("csv").mode("overwrite").save("/Volumes/workspace/default/volume_files/media_customer_reviews")

Another Example:

df.write.csv("/Volumes/workspace/default/volume_files/media_customer_reviews", header=True, mode="overwrite")

Official docs for syntax: https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/api/python/reference/pyspark.sql/api/pyspark.sql.DataFrameWriter.csv.html

All the best,
BS

Re: write file as csv format

BS_THE_ANALYST — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 12:44:14 GMT

@pop_smoke you also have the option to just literally write it out as a single CSV as such:

This does involve converting it to a pandas dataframe though.

Just depends on your usecase ☺️.

Syntax

# Convert to Pandas and save locally (good for small DataFrames) df.toPandas().to_csv("/Volumes/workspace/default/volume_files/media_customer_reviews_single.csv", index=False)

All the best,
BS

Re: write file as csv format

pop_smoke — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 13:28:11 GMT

Thank you so much. i did it now . but they are not showing me in just one part . it has created part for every row. is there anything that i can do? you have a made a folder media_customer_reviews . is it is necessary to make a folder everytime we write a new file

Re: write file as csv format

BS_THE_ANALYST — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 16:29:11 GMT

@pop_smoke the reason for that is because you're using Pyspark (distributed compute) vs Pandas (typically non distributed).

With big data processing engines, like Spark, the work is normally distributed across many computers (nodes/workers). When you want to write files out, typically, with big data, it's written out in partitions i.e. many files. It's easier just to have that contained in a directory. Whether it's a single CSV or many CSVs, it's just a scalable solution to write out more or more files into a single directory. You may find yourself with many files when writing out due to the default partitions that are created when you create a spark dataframe. This is something that you can alter, I believe. Have a google or chatGPT about the default number of partitions when writing out from a spark dataframe, it'll be a good read.

# Convert to Pandas and save locally (good for small DataFrames) df.toPandas().to_csv("/Volumes/workspace/default/volume_files/media_customer_reviews_single.csv", index=False)

If you want the "single CSV", use the pandas solution I provided above. Let me know if that works ☺️

All the best,
BS

Re: write file as csv format

pop_smoke — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 16:35:20 GMT

I just added coalesce in the same syntax that you provided me first time and i did not use pandas and i got the file in one file as CSV . i am from ab initio (old ETL software ) background . so i was little confused . we have multifile and serial file system in ab initio.
thank you

Re: write file as csv format

BS_THE_ANALYST — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 16:47:28 GMT

@pop_smoke no worries! My background is with Alteryx (ETL tool). I too am learning Databricks 😀.

I look forward to seeing you in the forum ☺️. Please share any cool things you find or any projects you do 👏.

All the best,
BS

Re: write file as csv format

pop_smoke — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 20:28:13 GMT

emp_filter_age= emp_filtered_1.select("emp_id","name","salary","age").where("age > 30")

display(emp_filter_age)

emp_filter_age.coalesce(1).write.format("csv").mode("ignore").option("header", "true").save("/Volumes/workspace/default/volume_file/age_greater_30")

i am using this way but the problem is that i have to create a new directory everytime under volume_file everytime i write a different file. we can name the directory but is there any way that if we are collection the data as a single csv file or single partition then can we name that particular file as we want inside the directory.

Re: write file as csv format

BS_THE_ANALYST — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 21:36:39 GMT

@pop_smoke that's a great question. If I'm honest, I'm not actually too sure if you can control the name of the underlying CSV (when writing out from a pyspark dataframe). I'm not saying this is best practice but I think you could pretty much write out and then rename it afterwards 🤔😂. Happy for other community members to show me otherwise, always willing to learn ☺️

dbutils has a bunch of cool stuff: https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/dev-tools/databricks-utils .. one of those is being able to move/copy/rename/delete files, it's pretty similar to "shutil" and "os" in standard python modules.

So, if we look at what gets written out:

If we target the parent directory i.e. (1) we can then rename all of the .csv files within it. One possible way would be to use something like for loop with a "counter". This will iterate over each of the files, rename them, and the counter will increase to provide a unique index for the next loop. We'll end up with something like {file_name}_1.csv ... {file_name}_2.csv ... {file_name}_3.csv .. remember, you could have many of the .csvs in your directory depending on the partititions. So I think a loop and a rename works here. Again, @pop_smoke , I'm not sure if this is best practice by any means 😂.

This is the code prepped ready to iterate through an rename

target_directory = "/Volumes/workspace/default/volume_files/media_customer_reviews" new_file_name_prexfix = "media_customer_reviews" i=1 for file in dbutils.fs.ls(target_directory): if file.name.startswith("part-"): dbutils.fs.mv(file.path, target_directory+"/"+new_file_name_prexfix+str(i)+".csv") i+=1

The result:

I guess, if you wanted to, you could also remove all the files in that directory i.e. "sucess" if you wanted to. DBUtils can do that. I'll leave that one to you 🤔😂.

@pop_smoke solutions, in the community world, are like liquid gold. Only use them for the posts that solve you problem. This puts a higher value on them when you receive them. Liking the post is just as good ☺️. Feel free to remove them from any of my previous posts that didn't answer your problem.

All the best,
BS