How to read binary data in pyspark - apache-spark

Question

I'm reading binary file http://snap.stanford.edu/data/amazon/productGraph/image_features/image_features.b
using pyspark.
import array
from io import StringIO
img_embedding_file = sc.binaryRecords("s3://bucket/image_features.b", 4106)
def mapper(features):
a = array.array('f')
a.frombytes(features)
return a.tolist()
def byte_mapper(bytes):
return str(bytes)
decoded_embeddings = img_embedding_file.map(lambda x: [byte_mapper(x[:10]), mapper(x[10:])])
When just product_id is selected from the rdd using
decoded_embeddings = img_embedding_file.map(lambda x: [byte_mapper(x[:10]), mapper(x[10:])])
The output for product_id is
["b'1582480311'", "b'\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x88c-?\\xeb\\xe2'", "b'7#\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00'", "b'\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00'", "b'\\xec/\\x0b?\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00K\\xea'", "b'\\x00\\x00c\\x7f\\xd9?\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00'", "b'L\\xa6\\n>\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\xfe\\xd4'", "b'\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\xe5\\xd0\\xa2='", "b'\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00'", "b'\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00\\x00'"]
The file is hosted on s3.
The file in each row has first 10 bytes for product_id next 4096 bytes as image_features
I'm able to extract all the 4096 image features but facing issue when reading the first 10 bytes and converting it into proper readable format.

Answer 1

EDIT:
Finally, the problem comes from the recordLength. It's not 4096 + 10 but 4096*4 + 10. Chaging to :
img_embedding_file = sc.binaryRecords("s3://bucket/image_features.b", 16394)
Should work.
Actually you can find this in the provided code from the web site you downloaded the binary file:
for i in range(4096):
feature.append(struct.unpack('f', f.read(4))) # <-- so 4096 * 4
Old answer:
I think the issue comes from your byte_mapper function.
That's not the correct way to convert bytes to string. You should be using decode:
bytes = b'1582480311'
print(str(bytes))
# output: "b'1582480311'"
print(bytes.decode("utf-8"))
# output: '1582480311'
If you're getting the error:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x88 in position 4: invalid start byte
That means product_id string contains non-utf8 characters. If you don't know the input encoding, it's difficult to convert into strings.
However, you may want to ignore those characters by adding option ignore to decode function:
bytes.decode("utf-8", "ignore")