textFile() can be used to load textFiles into an RDD and each line becomes an element in the RDD.

sc.textFile(name, minPartitions=None, use_unicode=True)

The following is an example of loading a textfile into an RDD using textFile():

scala> val rdd_two = sc.textFile("wiki1.txt")
rdd_two: org.apache.spark.rdd.RDD[String] = wiki1.txt MapPartitionsRDD[8] at textFile at <console>:24

scala> rdd_two.count
res6: Long = 9