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

The string function split can take an option boolean argument 'expand'.

Here is a solution using this argument:

(a.var1
  .str.split(",",expand=True)
  .set_index(a.var2)
  .stack()
  .reset_index(level=1, drop=True)
  .reset_index()
  .rename(columns={0:"var1"}))