Flattening Array Collections with explode()

How do we unnest an array of order items into individual rows, one row per item?

Advanced⏱ 2 Minutes⭐ 720 XP

🤔 THE QUESTION

How do we unnest an array of order items into individual rows, one row per item?

💡 WHAT IS IT?

explode(col) creates a new row for each element in the given array or map column.

🎯 WHAT IS IT USED FOR?

Unnesting shopping carts, normalising 1-to-many relationship payloads, and processing clickstream sequences.

💻 EXAMPLE

from pyspark.sql.functions import col, explode

exploded_df = df.select(col("order_id"), explode(col("items")).alias("item"))

Practice typing production-grade PySpark code for Flattening Array Collections with explode().