Loading data from HDFS using a custom InputFormat

Sometimes you need to load data in a specific format and TextInputFormat is not a good fit for that. Spark provides two methods for this purpose:

• sparkContext.hadoopFile: This supports the old MapReduce API
• sparkContext.newAPIHadoopFile: This supports the new MapReduce API

These two methods provide support for all of Hadoop's built-in InputFormats interfaces as well as any custom InputFormat.

How to do it...

We are going to load text data in key-value format and load it in Spark using KeyValueTextInputFormat:

1. Create the currency directory by using the following command:

   $ mkdir currency

2. Change the current directory to currency:

   $ cd currency

3. Create the na.txt text file and enter currency values in key-value format delimited by tab (key: country, value: currency):

   $ vi na.txt
   United States of America        US Dollar
   Canada  Canadian Dollar
   Mexico  Peso
   

   You can create more files for each continent.

4. Upload the currency folder to HDFS:

   $ hdfs dfs ...