Spark - convert JSON array object to array of string

See the example below without udf:

import pyspark.sql.functions as f
from pyspark import Row
from pyspark.shell import spark
from pyspark.sql.types import ArrayType, StructType, StructField, StringType

df = spark.createDataFrame([
    Row(values='[{"text":"Tea"},{"text":"GoldenGlobes"}]'),
    Row(values='[{"text":"GoldenGlobes"}]')
])

schema = ArrayType(StructType([
    StructField('text', StringType())
]))

df \
    .withColumn('array_of_str', f.from_json(f.col('values'), schema).text) \
    .show()

Output:

+--------------------+-------------------+
|              values|       array_of_str|
+--------------------+-------------------+
|[{"text":"Tea"},{...|[Tea, GoldenGlobes]|
|[{"text":"GoldenG...|     [GoldenGlobes]|
+--------------------+-------------------+

If the type of your column is array then something like this should work (not tested):

from pyspark.sql import functions as F
from pyspark.sql import types as T

c = F.array([F.get_json_object(F.col("colname")[0], '$.text')),  
             F.get_json_object(F.col("colname")[1], '$.text'))])

df = df.withColumn("new_col", c)

Or if the length is not fixed (I do not see a solution without an udf) :

F.udf(T.ArrayType())
def get_list(x):
    o_list = []
    for elt in x:
        o_list.append(elt["text"])
    return o_list

df = df.withColumn("new_col", get_list("colname"))

Sharing the Java syntax :

import static org.apache.spark.sql.functions.from_json;
import static org.apache.spark.sql.functions.get_json_object;
import static org.apache.spark.sql.functions.col;
import org.apache.spark.sql.types.StructType;
import org.apache.spark.sql.types.DataTypes;
import org.apache.spark.sql.types.StructField;
import static org.apache.spark.sql.types.DataTypes.StringType;

Dataset<Row> df = getYourDf();

StructType structschema =
                DataTypes.createStructType(
                        new StructField[] {
                                DataTypes.createStructField("text", StringType, true)
                        });

ArrayType schema = new ArrayType(structschema,true);


df = df.withColumn("array_of_str",from_json(col("colname"), schema).getField("text"));

I am facing the exact opposite problem. I wanted to convert the array to strings along with the keys and values but unfortunately converting the arrays into strings is removin the keys. This could be the solution in your case though.

if isinstance(field.dataType, ArrayType):
    df = df.withColumn(field.name, col(field.name).cast("string"))