What is the equivalent to scala.util.Try in pyspark?

Better is a subjective term but there are a few approaches you can try.

• The simplest thing you can do in this particular case is to avoid exceptions whatsoever. All you need is a flatMap and some slicing:

  log.flatMap(lambda s : s.split(' ')[8:9])
  

  As you can see it means no need for an exception handling or subsequent filter.

• Previous idea can be extended with a simple wrapper

  def seq_try(f, *args, **kwargs):
      try:
          return [f(*args, **kwargs)]
      except:
          return []
  

  and example usage

  from operator import div # FYI operator provides getitem as well.
  
  rdd = sc.parallelize([1, 2, 0, 3, 0, 5, "foo"])
  
  rdd.flatMap(lambda x: seq_try(div, 1., x)).collect()
  ## [1.0, 0.5, 0.3333333333333333, 0.2]
  

• finally more OO approach:

  import inspect as _inspect
  
  class _Try(object): pass    
  
  class Failure(_Try):
      def __init__(self, e):
          if Exception not in _inspect.getmro(e.__class__):
              msg = "Invalid type for Failure: {0}"
              raise TypeError(msg.format(e.__class__))
          self._e = e
          self.isSuccess =  False
          self.isFailure = True
  
      def get(self): raise self._e
  
      def __repr__(self):
          return "Failure({0})".format(repr(self._e))
  
  class Success(_Try):
      def __init__(self, v):
          self._v = v
          self.isSuccess = True
          self.isFailure = False
  
      def get(self): return self._v
  
      def __repr__(self):
          return "Success({0})".format(repr(self._v))
  
  def Try(f, *args, **kwargs):
      try:
          return Success(f(*args, **kwargs))
      except Exception as e:
          return Failure(e)
  

  and example usage:

  tries = rdd.map(lambda x: Try(div, 1.0, x))
  tries.collect()
  ## [Success(1.0),
  ##  Success(0.5),
  ##  Failure(ZeroDivisionError('float division by zero',)),
  ##  Success(0.3333333333333333),
  ##  Failure(ZeroDivisionError('float division by zero',)),
  ##  Success(0.2),
  ##  Failure(TypeError("unsupported operand type(s) for /: 'float' and 'str'",))]
  
  tries.filter(lambda x: x.isSuccess).map(lambda x: x.get()).collect()
  ## [1.0, 0.5, 0.3333333333333333, 0.2]
  

  You can even use pattern matching with multipledispatch

  from multipledispatch import dispatch
  from operator import getitem
  
  @dispatch(Success)
  def check(x): return "Another great success"
  
  @dispatch(Failure)
  def check(x): return "What a failure"
  
  a_list = [1, 2, 3]
  
  check(Try(getitem, a_list, 1))
  ## 'Another great success'
  
  check(Try(getitem, a_list, 10)) 
  ## 'What a failure'
  

  If you like this approach I’ve pushed a little bit more complete implementation to GitHub and pypi.