[MAPREDUCE-2254] Allow setting of end-of-record delimiter for TextInputFormat

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.23.0
• Hadoop Flags: Reviewed
• Release Note: TextInputFormat may now split lines with delimiters other than newline, by specifying a configuration parameter "textinputformat.record.delimiter"
• Assignee: Ahmed Radwan
• Reporter: Ahmed Radwan
• Created: 11/Jan/11 00:57
• Updated: 01/Mar/18 20:57
• Resolved: 24/Feb/11 07:10

Description

It will be useful to allow setting the end-of-record delimiter for TextInputFormat. The current implementation hardcodes '\n', '\r' or '\r\n' as the only possible record delimiters. This is a problem if users have embedded newlines in their data fields (which is pretty common). This is also a problem for other tools using this TextInputFormat (See for example: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PIG-836 and https://issues.cloudera.org/browse/SQOOP-136).

I have wrote a patch to address this issue. This patch allows users to specify any custom end-of-record delimiter using a new added configuration property. For backward compatibility, if this new configuration property is absent, then the same exact previous delimiters are used (i.e., '\n', '\r' or '\r\n').

Issue Links

• incorporates: HADOOP-7096 Allow setting of end-of-record delimiter for TextInputFormat
• is related to: SPARK-23554 Hive's textinputformat.record.delimiter equivalent in Spark