Reorder PySpark dataframe columns on specific sort logic

Question

I have a PySpark dataframe with the below column order. I need to order it as per the 'branch'. How do I do it? df.select(sorted(df.columns)) doesn't seem to work the way I want.

Existing column order:

store_id,
store_name,
month_1_branch_A_profit,
month_1_branch_B_profit,
month_1_branch_C_profit,
month_1_branch_D_profit,
month_2_branch_A_profit,
month_2_branch_B_profit,
month_2_branch_C_profit,
month_2_branch_D_profit,
.
.
month_12_branch_A_profit,
month_12_branch_B_profit,
month_12_branch_C_profit,
month_12_branch_D_profit

Desired column order:

store_id,
store_name,
month_1_branch_A_profit,
month_2_branch_A_profit,
month_3_branch_A_profit,
month_4_branch_A_profit,
.
.
month_12_branch_A_profit,
month_1_branch_B_profit,
month_2_branch_B_profit,
month_3_branch_B_profit,
.
.
month_12_branch_B_profit,
..

Answer 1

You could manually build your list of columns.

col_fmt = 'month_{}_branch_{}_profit'
cols = ['store_id', 'store_name']
for branch in ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D']:
    for i in range(1, 13):
        cols.append(col_fmt.format(i, branch))
df.select(cols)

Alternatively, I'd recommend building a better dataframe that takes advantage of array + struct/map datatypes. E.g.

months - array (size 12)
  - branches: map<string, struct>
    - key: string  (branch name)
    - value: struct
      - profit: float

This way, arrays would already be "sorted". Map order doesn't really matter, and it makes SQL queries specific to certain months and branches easier to read (and probably faster with predicate pushdowns)