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

I had a similar problem, my solution was converting the dataframe to a list of dictionaries first, then do the transition. Here is the function:

import re
import pandas as pd

def separate_row(df, column_name):
    ls = []
    for row_dict in df.to_dict('records'):
        for word in re.split(',', row_dict[column_name]):
            row = row_dict.copy()
            row[column_name]=word
            ls.append(row)
    return pd.DataFrame(ls)

Example:

>>> from pandas import DataFrame
>>> import numpy as np
>>> a = DataFrame([{'var1': 'a,b,c', 'var2': 1},
               {'var1': 'd,e,f', 'var2': 2}])
>>> a
    var1  var2
0  a,b,c     1
1  d,e,f     2
>>> separate_row(a, "var1")
  var1  var2
0    a     1
1    b     1
2    c     1
3    d     2
4    e     2
5    f     2

You can also change the function a bit to support separating list type rows.