How to Process Nasty Fixed Width Files Using Apache Spark

A fixed width file is a very common flat file format when working with SAP, Mainframe, and Web Logs. Converting the data into a dataframe using metadata is always a challenge for Spark Developers. This particular article talks about all kinds of typical scenarios that a developer might face while working with a fixed witdth file. This solution is generic to any fixed width file and very easy to implement. This also takes care of the Tail Safe Stack as the RDD gets into the foldLeft operator.

Let's check the source file first and then the metadata file: