PySpark: Absolute value of a column. TypeError: a float is required

I have a dataframe df created as follow,

schema = StructType([StructField('Id', StringType(), False), StructField('Value', FloatType(), False)]) df = spark.createDataFrame([('a',5.0),('b',1.0),('c',-0.3)],schema) 

It looks like

+---+-----+ | Id|Value| +---+-----+ | a| 5.0| | b| 1.0| | c| -0.3| +---+-----+ 

Now I want to take absolute value of Value, which should return

+---+-----+ | Id|Value| +---+-----+ | a| 5.0| | b| 1.0| | c| 0.3| +---+-----+ 

I've tried

df = df.withColumn('Value',math.fabs(df.Value)) 

But it complains TypeError: a float is required. However Value column was specified with FloatType().

Any clue on how to correctly do this? Thanks!

1 Answer

You can use the native Spark function abs():

from pyspark.sql.functions import abs df1 = df.withColumn('Value',abs(df.Value)) df1.show() +---+-----+ | Id|Value| +---+-----+ | a| 5.0| | b| 1.0| | c| 0.3| +---+-----+