How do I determine an offset in Apache Spark?

Question

I'm searching through some data files (~20GB). I'd like to find some specific terms in that data and mark the offset for the matches. Is there a way to have Spark identify the offset for the chunk of data I'm operating on?

import org.apache.spark.api.java.*;
import org.apache.spark.SparkConf;
import org.apache.spark.api.java.function.Function;

import java.util.regex.*;

public class Grep {
        public static void main( String args[] ) {
            SparkConf        conf       = new SparkConf().setMaster( "spark://ourip:7077" );
            JavaSparkContext jsc        = new JavaSparkContext( conf );
            JavaRDD<String>  data       = jsc.textFile( "hdfs://ourip/test/testdata.txt" ); // load the data from HDFS
            JavaRDD<String>  filterData = data.filter( new Function<String, Boolean>() {
                    // I'd like to do something here to get the offset in the original file of the string "babe ruth"
                    public Boolean call( String s ) { return s.toLowerCase().contains( "babe ruth" ); } // case insens matching

            });

            long matches = filterData.count();  // count the hits

            // execute the RDD filter
            System.out.println( "Lines with search terms: " + matches );
 );
        } //  end main
} // end class Grep

I'd like to do something in the "filter" operation to compute the offset of "babe ruth" in the original file. I can get the offset of "babe ruth" in the current line, but what's the process or function that tells me the offset of the line within the file?

Answer 1

In Spark common Hadoop Input Format can be used. To read the byte offset from the file you can use class TextInputFormat from Hadoop ( org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.lib.input ). It is already bundled with Spark.

It will read the file as key (byte offset) and value (text line):

An InputFormat for plain text files. Files are broken into lines. Either linefeed or carriage-return are used to signal end of line. Keys are the position in the file, and values are the line of text.

In Spark it can be used by calling newAPIHadoopFile()

SparkConf conf = new SparkConf().setMaster("");
JavaSparkContext jsc = new JavaSparkContext(conf);

// read the content of the file using Hadoop format
JavaPairRDD<LongWritable, Text> data = jsc.newAPIHadoopFile(
        "file_path", // input path
        TextInputFormat.class, // used input format class
        LongWritable.class, // class of the value
        Text.class, // class of the value
        new Configuration());    

JavaRDD<String> mapped = data.map(new Function<Tuple2<LongWritable, Text>, String>() {
    @Override
    public String call(Tuple2<LongWritable, Text> tuple) throws Exception {
        // you will get each line from as a tuple (offset, text)    
        long pos = tuple._1().get(); // extract offset
        String line = tuple._2().toString(); // extract text

        return pos + " " + line;
    }
});

Answer 2

You could use the wholeTextFiles(String path, int minPartitions) method from JavaSparkContext to return a JavaPairRDD<String,String> where the key is filename and the value is a string containing the entire content of a file (thus, each record in this RDD represents a file). From here, simply run a map() that will call indexOf(String searchString) on each value. This should return the first index in each file with the occurrence of the string in question.

(EDIT:)

So finding the offset in a distributed fashion for one file (per your use case below in the comments) is possible. Below is an example that works in Scala.

val searchString = *search string*
val rdd1 = sc.textFile(*input file*, *num partitions*)

// Zip RDD lines with their indices
val zrdd1 = rdd1.zipWithIndex()

// Find the first RDD line that contains the string in question
val firstFind = zrdd1.filter { case (line, index) => line.contains(searchString) }.first()

// Grab all lines before the line containing the search string and sum up all of their lengths (and then add the inline offset)
val filterLines = zrdd1.filter { case (line, index) => index < firstFind._2 }
val offset = filterLines.map { case (line, index) => line.length }.reduce(_ + _) + firstFind._1.indexOf(searchString)

Note that you would additionally need to add any new line characters manually on top of this since they are not accounted for (the input format uses new lines as demarcations between records). The number of new lines is simply the number of lines before the line containing the search string so this is trivial to add.

I'm not entirely familiar with the Java API unfortunately and it's not exactly easy to test so I'm not sure if the code below works but have at it (Also, I used Java 1.7 but 1.8 compresses a lot of this code with lambda expressions.):

String searchString = *search string*;
JavaRDD<String> data = jsc.textFile("hdfs://ourip/test/testdata.txt");

JavaRDD<Tuple2<String, Long>> zrdd1 = data.zipWithIndex();

Tuple2<String, Long> firstFind = zrdd1.filter(new Function<Tuple2<String, Long>, Boolean>() {
      public Boolean call(Tuple2<String, Long> input) { return input.productElement(0).contains(searchString); }
  }).first();

JavaRDD<Tuple2<String, Long>> filterLines = zrdd1.filter(new Function<Tuple2<String, Long>, Boolean>() {
      public Boolean call(Tuple2<String, Long> input) { return input.productElement(1) < firstFind.productElement(1); }
  });

Long offset = filterLines.map(new Function<Tuple2<String, Long>, Int>() {
      public Int call(Tuple2<String, Long> input) { return input.productElement(0).length(); }
  }).reduce(new Function2<Integer, Integer, Integer>() {
      public Integer call(Integer a, Integer b) { return a + b; }
  }) + firstFind.productElement(0).indexOf(searchString);

This can only be done when your input is one file (since otherwise, zipWithIndex() wouldn't guarantee offsets within a file) but this method works for an RDD of any number of partitions so feel free to partition your file up into any number of chunks.