Binary File Data Source

Since Spark 3.0, Spark supports binary file data source, which reads binary files and converts each file into a single record that contains the raw content and metadata of the file. It produces a DataFrame with the following columns and possibly partition columns:

• path: StringType
• modificationTime: TimestampType
• length: LongType
• content: BinaryType

To read whole binary files, you need to specify the data source format as binaryFile. To load files with paths matching a given glob pattern while keeping the behavior of partition discovery, you can use the general data source option pathGlobFilter. For example, the following code reads all PNG files from the input directory:

spark.read.format("binaryFile").option("pathGlobFilter", "*.png").load("/path/to/data")

spark.read().format("binaryFile").option("pathGlobFilter", "*.png").load("/path/to/data");

spark.read.format("binaryFile").option("pathGlobFilter", "*.png").load("/path/to/data")

read.df("/path/to/data", source = "binaryFile", pathGlobFilter = "*.png")

Binary file data source does not support writing a DataFrame back to the original files.