title: Getting extra nulls when loading data into hive table while using regex delimiter
body: <p>I have the following 5 lines of data in a file on hdfs. I want to load this to a table. I have regex that will do it, but it is loading an extra row of nulls for each line of data. Does anyone know why this is happening?</p>
  
  <pre><code>19/Mar/2018 3:00:06 INFO activity Submitted to Splunk
  19/Mar/2018 3:00:20 INFO activity response received statuscode=200 bytesreceived=11548264
  19/Mar/2018 3:00:21 INFO activity done writing K:\Data\031818\activity_031818.csv lineswritten=296110
  19/Mar/2018 3:00:21 INFO hardware Submitted to Splunk 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I use this to create the table</p>
  
  <pre><code>create table Splunk_BCO_MSR 
  (
  ts string, 
  status string, 
  area string, 
  text string
  ) 
  partitioned by (partition_dt date)
  ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.apache.hadoop.hive.contrib.serde2.RegexSerDe' 
  WITH SERDEPROPERTIES ("input.regex" = "([^ ]+[ ][^ ]*) ([^ ]*) ([^ ]*) (.*)?");
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This almost works, however when I run a select * from the table, I get 8 rows instead of 4. It looks like there is an additional row of NULLS being added.</p>
  
  <pre><code>| 19/Mar/2018 3:00:06  | INFO              | activity  | Submitted to Splunk                                                                                                                                        | 2018-03-18                   |
  | NULL                                     | NULL                   | NULL                       | NULL                                                                                                                                                                           | 2018-03-18                   |
  | 19/Mar/2018 3:00:20  | INFO              | activity  | response received statuscode=200 bytesreceived=11548264                                                                | 2018-03-18                   |
  | NULL                                     | NULL                   | NULL                       | NULL                                                                                                                                                                           | 2018-03-18                   |
  | 19/Mar/2018 3:00:21  | INFO              | activity  | done writing K:\Data\031818\activity_031818.csv lineswritten=296110  | 2018-03-18                   |
  | NULL                                     | NULL                   | NULL                       | NULL                                                                                                                                                                           | 2018-03-18                   |
  | 19/Mar/2018 3:00:21  | INFO              | hardware  | Submitted to Splunk                                                                                                                                        | 2018-03-18                   |
  | NULL                                     | NULL                   | NULL                       | NULL                                                                                                                                                                           | 2018-03-18  
  </code></pre>