Does the 'E' character have a specific function in Spark SQL?

Data and Databases
1

I’m attempting to merge three fields into one using Spark SQL’s concat function. One of the fields contains the character ‘E’, and when I try to concatenate it with the other two fields, I receive an unexpected result. Here’s what I’m seeing:

select
    concat('22','E','01') as result_with_E,
    concat('22','D','01') as result_with_D

I anticipated that result_with_E would equal ‘22E01’, but it returns 220 instead. However, for ‘D’, it returns 22D01 correctly.

Does the single ‘E’ character carry any special significance in Spark SQL? When using ‘EE’ (double), it operates normally…

I’m sorry if this has been previously addressed; I couldn’t locate any information on it.

2

Hey Zack, are you sure it’s not treating ‘E’ as a part of a scientific notation? In some cases, ‘E’ can mess things up if it thinks you’re trying to define an exponential value. Try casting the fields to string before concatenating to ensure that ‘E’ stays as text.

3

The behavior you’re encountering with ‘E’ is likely due to how Spark SQL interprets literals. When a single ‘E’ is used, Spark might be interpreting the sequence as part of a scientific notation, effectively considering it as a number-like structure which can lead it to misinterpret or even ignore it. A workaround could be to concatenate by explicitly casting each component to a string using CAST, or you could use the lit function to explicitly define them as string literals. This would prevent any unintended type conversions.

4

Hmm, Zack, are you certain the issue is exclusive to ‘E’? Does the same problm happen if you use other letters like ‘L’ or ‘H’? I’m curious if treating this specific character differently is a quirk of Spark SQL or maybe related to someting else in your dataset.