Using SparkContext, it is possible to load a text file in RDD using the textFile method. Additionally, the wholeTextFile method can read the contents of a directory to RDD. The following examples show you how a file, based on the local filesystem (file://) or HDFS (hdfs://), can be read to a Spark RDD. These examples show you that the data will be divided into six partitions for increased performance. The first two examples are the same as they both load a file from the Linux filesystem, whereas the last one resides in HDFS:

sc.textFile("/data/spark/tweets.txt",6)
sc.textFile("file:///data/spark/tweets.txt",6)
sc.textFile("hdfs://server1:4014/data/spark/tweets.txt",6)