Splitting a text file based on empty lines in Spark

Question

I am working on a really big file which is a very large text document almost 2GBs.

Something like this -

\#\*MOSFET table look-up models for circuit simulation
\#t1984
\#cIntegration, the VLSI Journal
\#index1

\#\*The verification of the protection mechanisms of high-level language machines
\#@Virgil D. Gligor
\#t1984
\#cInternational Journal of Parallel Programming
\#index2

\#\*Another view of functional and multivalued dependencies in the relational database model
\#@M. Gyssens, J. Paredaens
\#t1984
\#cInternational Journal of Parallel Programming
\#index3

\#\*Entity-relationship diagrams which are in BCNF
\#@Sushil Jajodia, Peter A. Ng, Frederick N. Springsteel
\#t1984
\#cInternational Journal of Parallel Programming
\#index4

I want to read them in spark and split them based on the empty blocks in spark and create blocks of these data in PySpark.

#*Entity-relationship diagrams which are in BCNF #@Sushil Jajodia, Peter A. Ng, Frederick N. Springsteel #t1984 #cInternational Journal of Parallel Programming #index4

The code I currently wrote is rdd = sc.textFile('acm.txt').flatMap( lambda x : x.split("\n\n") )

Answer 1

From what I understand, you want to read this text file in spark and have one record per paragraph. For that, you can change the record delimiter (which is \n by default) like this:

In scala:

sc.hadoopConfiguration.set("textinputformat.record.delimiter","\n\n")
val rdd = sc.textFile("acm.txt")

In python (you need to access the java spark context to have access to the hadoop configuration):

sc._jsc.hadoopConfiguration().set("textinputformat.record.delimiter","\n\n")
rdd = sc.textFile("acm.txt")