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Forum Discussion
reading parquet file using python sdk
Hi, I am trying to read a parquet file using pandas and vaex. I can sucessfully read a .csv but I get the following error message when I try to download the parquet file with dbx.files_download : ...
Thanks for following up and sharing that. For reference, the URL parameters for shared links like that are documented here.
Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffI see you're getting a 'not_file' error, which means: "We were expecting a file, but the given path refers to something that isn’t a file."
It looks like the ".parquet" is not a file, but rather a sort of folder, possibly referred to as a "package" or "bundle" in some environments.
That being the case, to download that you would instead need to use files_download_zip (or files_download_zip_to_file) and then unzip the downloaded zip file, or walk through the contents using files_list_folder/files_list_folder_continue and then download each individual nested item using files_download (or files_download_to_file). The first option of using files_download_zip is probably better/faster.
Thanks for replying. I have tried with one of your solutions but it's really slow.
file_list = []
for entry in dbx.files_list_folder(path="/County.parquet").entries:
print(entry.path_lower)
_, dwnld_file = dbx.files_download(entry.path_lower)
with io.BytesIO(dwnld_file.content) as stream:
pd_df = pd.read_parquet(stream) #this works
vdf = vaex.from_pandas(pd_df)
del pd_df
file_list.append(vdf)
conc_df = vaex.concat(file_list)
print(conc_df)
I have tried with dbx.files_download_zip but I can't find a way to read the data it returns 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x82 in position 12: invalid start byte.
- Greg-DB
Yes, using files_list_folder/files_list_folder_continue and files_download (or files_download_to_file) requires more API calls so it would be less performant.
The files_download_zip method would return the requested data the same way files_download would, except that it would be zip data that you would need to unzip to access the original folder. Also, note that you can use files_download_zip_to_file if you want to save the zip data to a file. Can you share the code you're having trouble with for that, and indicate which line fails with that error?
When I try:
md, zipFile = dbx.files_download_zip('/County_test.parquet')
with ZipFile(zipFile, 'r') as zip:with ZipFile(zipFile, 'r') as zip: fails with AttributeError: 'Response' object has no attribute 'seek'
I can't understand how to solve this
- Greg-DB
The files_download_zip method works like the files_download method, in that the second value it returns is the response object. To access the data from the response object, you would access the 'content' field like you did in your other code snippet. So, in this case, it would be 'zipFile.content'.
Beyond that, refer to the documentation for ZipFile, BytesIO, pandas, etc., for information on using those. Those aren't made by Dropbox so I can't offer support for those in particular.
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