Getting unary error for escaped characters in Scala

Question

Trying to write a Hive query in Scala/Spark, which looks like this

val myQuery = "create table myTable(col1 STRING, col2 STRING) ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\t' location 'path/from/to' as select * myHiveTable"

I'm getting an error from my use of '\t'

value unary_+ is not a member of String

What's the proper way to handle this character in Scala?

Answer 1

If you use single double quotes " then escaped characters are interpreted according to their meaning, i.e. \t becomes a tab and \n becomes a new line. Example:

scala> val myQuery = "create table myTable(col1 STRING, col2 STRING) ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\t' location 'path/from/to' as select * myHiveTable"
myQuery: String = create table myTable(col1 STRING, col2 STRING) ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY '    ' location 'path/from/to' as select * myHiveTable

If you use tripple double quotes """ Scala will leave the string as it is. Example:

scala> val myQuery = """create table myTable(col1 STRING, col2 STRING) ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\t' location 'path/from/to' as select * myHiveTable"""
myQuery: String = create table myTable(col1 STRING, col2 STRING) ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\t' location 'path/from/to' as select * myHiveTable

I believe Spark expects to see \t as text value (2 chars) rather than as a value of tab (U+0009).

Answer 2

1) You should use escape slash for \t, because you want to pass this query somewhere (to hive). If you don't add escape slash, it will save real tab whitespace into this string, so hive will not understand it.

2) You didn't provide enough details, especially code where error occurred, you only show variable assignment to hive query string.

3) where is FROM in your sql example?