apache spark - How to split pipe-separated column into multiple rows?

Question

I have a dataframe that contains the following:

movieId / movieName / genre
1         example1    action|thriller|romance
2         example2    fantastic|action

I would like to obtain a second dataframe (from the first one), that contains the following:

movieId / movieName / genre
1         example1    action
1         example1    thriller
1         example1    romance
2         example2    fantastic
2         example2    action

How I can do that?

Answer 1

I'd use split standard function.

scala> movies.show(truncate = false)
+-------+---------+-----------------------+
|movieId|movieName|genre                  |
+-------+---------+-----------------------+
|1      |example1 |action|thriller|romance|
|2      |example2 |fantastic|action       |
+-------+---------+-----------------------+

scala> movies.withColumn("genre", explode(split($"genre", "[|]"))).show
+-------+---------+---------+
|movieId|movieName|    genre|
+-------+---------+---------+
|      1| example1|   action|
|      1| example1| thriller|
|      1| example1|  romance|
|      2| example2|fantastic|
|      2| example2|   action|
+-------+---------+---------+

// You can use \| for split instead
scala> movies.withColumn("genre", explode(split($"genre", "\|"))).show
+-------+---------+---------+
|movieId|movieName|    genre|
+-------+---------+---------+
|      1| example1|   action|
|      1| example1| thriller|
|      1| example1|  romance|
|      2| example2|fantastic|
|      2| example2|   action|
+-------+---------+---------+

p.s. You could use Dataset.flatMap to achieve the same result which is something Scala devs would enjoy more I'm sure.