Split (explode) pandas dataframe string entry to separate rows

Question

I have a pandas dataframe in which one column of text strings contains comma-separated values. I want to split each CSV field and create a new row per entry (as

Answer 1

Here is a fairly straightforward message that uses the split method from pandas str accessor and then uses NumPy to flatten each row into a single array.

The corresponding values are retrieved by repeating the non-split column the correct number of times with np.repeat.

var1 = df.var1.str.split(',', expand=True).values.ravel()
var2 = np.repeat(df.var2.values, len(var1) / len(df))

pd.DataFrame({'var1': var1,
              'var2': var2})

  var1  var2
0    a     1
1    b     1
2    c     1
3    d     2
4    e     2
5    f     2