How to get distinct rows in dataframe using PySpark?

Last Updated : 30 May, 2021

In this article we are going to get the distinct data from pyspark dataframe in Python, So we are going to create the dataframe using a nested list and get the distinct data.

We are going to create a dataframe from pyspark list bypassing the list to the createDataFrame() method from pyspark, then by using distinct() function we will get the distinct rows from the dataframe.

Syntax: dataframe.distinct()

Where dataframe is the dataframe name created from the nested lists using pyspark

Example 1: Python code to get the distinct data from college data in a data frame created by list of lists.

Python3

# importing module
import pyspark

# importing sparksession from 
# pyspark.sql module
from pyspark.sql import SparkSession

# creating sparksession and giving
# an app name
spark = SparkSession.builder.appName('sparkdf').getOrCreate()

# list  of college data
data = [["1", "bobby", "vvit"], 
        ["2", "sravan", "jntuk"],
        ["3", "rohith", "AU"],
        ["4", "sridevi", "GVRS"], 
        ["1", "bobby", "vvit"]]

# specify column names
columns = ['ID', 'NAME', 'COLLEGE']

# creating a dataframe from the 
# lists of data
dataframe = spark.createDataFrame(data, columns)

print('Actual data in dataframe')
dataframe.show()

Output:

Now Get the distinct rows in dataframe:

Python3

print('distinct data')

# display distinct data
dataframe.distinct().show()

Output:

Example 2: Python program to find distinct values from 1 row

Python3

# importing module
import pyspark

# importing sparksession from 
# pyspark.sql module
from pyspark.sql import SparkSession

# creating sparksession and giving
# an app name
spark = SparkSession.builder.appName('sparkdf').getOrCreate()

# list  of college data
data = [["1", "bobby", "vvit"]]

# specify column names
columns = ['ID', 'NAME', 'COLLEGE']

# creating a dataframe from the 
# list of data
dataframe = spark.createDataFrame(data, columns)

print('Actual data in dataframe')
dataframe.show()

Output:

Now Get the distinct rows in dataframe: