How to display an UTF8 column content using Apache Arrow Rust Crate?

Question

I managed to load a parquet file based on example & documentation of rust's apache::arrow implementation.

    use parquet::arrow::{ParquetFileArrowReader, ArrowReader};
    use std::rc::Rc;
    use arrow::record_batch::RecordBatchReader;

    let file = File::open(&Path::new("./path_to/file.parquet")).unwrap();
    let file_reader = SerializedFileReader::new(file).unwrap();
    let mut arrow_reader = ParquetFileArrowReader::new(Rc::new(file_reader));

    println!("Converted arrow schema is: {}", arrow_reader.get_schema().unwrap());

    let mut record_batch_reader = arrow_reader.get_record_reader(2048).unwrap();

I was able to display the name and type of columns of each batch:

    loop {
       let record_batch = record_batch_reader.next_batch().unwrap().unwrap();
       if record_batch.num_rows() > 0 {
           println!("Schema: {}.", record_batch.schema());
       }
    }

but I am quite confused on how to display the content of the columns. How can I retrieve the content of the first column and print it?

Answer 1

The last version of apache arrow seams to have a prettifyer class. Unfortunately this is not in the last available package (1.0.1).

use arrow::util::pretty;
pretty::print_batches(&batch);

The manual way to do it is through downcasting.

// For an int:
let col = batch.column(0).as_any().downcast_ref::<arrow::array::Int32Array>();

// For a Utf8 string:
let col = batch.column(0).as_any().downcast_ref::<arrow::array::StringArray>();

Then you can simply print it:

println!("Columns: {:?}.", col);