Display DataFrame in Pyspark with show()

In this tutorial, we will look at how to display a dataframe using the show() method in PySpark with the help of some examples.

How to display dataframe in Pyspark?

The show() method in Pyspark is used to display the data from a dataframe in a tabular format. The following is the syntax –

df.show(n,vertical,truncate)

Here, df is the dataframe you want to display. The show() method takes the following parameters –

• n – The number of rows to displapy from the top.
• vertical – Whether to display the dataframe data in a vertical format or not. This parameter is False by default.
• truncate – If set to True, truncate strings longer than 20 chars by default. If set to a number greater than one, truncates long strings to length truncate and align cells right.

Examples

Let’s now look at some examples of using the above function to show a dataframe in Pyspark. First, let’s create a Pyspark dataframe that we will be using throughout this tutorial.

#import the pyspark module
import pyspark
  
# import the  sparksession class  from pyspark.sql
from pyspark.sql import SparkSession
  
# create an app from SparkSession class
spark = SparkSession.builder.appName('datascience_parichay').getOrCreate()

# books data as list of lists
df = [[1, "php", "sravan", 234],
        [2, "sql", "chandra sekhar", 345],
        [3, "python", "harsha", 1200],
        [4, "R", "Rohith", 120],
        [5, "hadoop", "manasa", 2340]
        ]

# create dataframe from the books data above by specifying the columns
dataframe = spark.createDataFrame(df, ['Book_Id', 'Book_Name', 'Author', 'Price'])

We now have a dataframe containing book details.

Using show() function with default parameters

Let’s display the dataframe created above using the show() method without any parameters.

# display dataframe with default parameters
dataframe.show()

Output:

+-------+---------+--------------+-----+
|Book_Id|Book_Name|        Author|Price|
+-------+---------+--------------+-----+
|      1|      php|        sravan|  234|
|      2|      sql|chandra sekhar|  345|
|      3|   python|        harsha| 1200|
|      4|        R|        Rohith|  120|
|      5|   hadoop|        manasa| 2340|
+-------+---------+--------------+-----+

The dataframe is displayed in tabular format.

Display top 3 rows

Let’s now display only the first three rows from the dataframe. For this, pass n=3 to the pyspark dataframe show() function.

# display only top three rows 
dataframe.show(n=3)

Output:

+-------+---------+--------------+-----+
|Book_Id|Book_Name|        Author|Price|
+-------+---------+--------------+-----+
|      1|      php|        sravan|  234|
|      2|      sql|chandra sekhar|  345|
|      3|   python|        harsha| 1200|
+-------+---------+--------------+-----+
only showing top 3 rows

You can see only the top three rows are now displayed.

Display dataframe in vertical format

Let’s now display a dataframe in a vertical format. For this, pass vertical=True to the show() function.

# display dataframe in vertical format
dataframe.show(vertical = True)

Output:

-RECORD 0-------------------
 Book_Id   | 1              
 Book_Name | php            
 Author    | sravan         
 Price     | 234            
-RECORD 1-------------------
 Book_Id   | 2              
 Book_Name | sql            
 Author    | chandra sekhar 
 Price     | 345            
-RECORD 2-------------------
 Book_Id   | 3              
 Book_Name | python         
 Author    | harsha         
 Price     | 1200           
-RECORD 3-------------------
 Book_Id   | 4              
 Book_Name | R              
 Author    | Rohith         
 Price     | 120            
-RECORD 4-------------------
 Book_Id   | 5              
 Book_Name | hadoop         
 Author    | manasa         
 Price     | 2340           

You can see that the dataframe records are displayed in vertical format.

Truncate longer strings in dataframe

In this example, we show the dataframe by truncating strings to a maximum length of two. For this, we pass truncate=2 to the show() function.

# display dataframe with only first two characters of string
dataframe.show(truncate=2)

Output:

+-------+---------+------+-----+
|Book_Id|Book_Name|Author|Price|
+-------+---------+------+-----+
|      1|       ph|    sr|   23|
|      2|       sq|    ch|   34|
|      3|       py|    ha|   12|
|      4|        R|    Ro|   12|
|      5|       ha|    ma|   23|
+-------+---------+------+-----+

The dataframe is displayed such that strings after length two are truncated.

You might also be interested in –

• Show all columns of Pandas DataFrame in Jupyter Notebook
• Pandas – Read only the first n rows of a CSV file