Have Pandas column containing lists, how to pivot unique list elements to columns?

Question

I wrote a web scraper to pull information from a table of products and build a dataframe. The data table has a Description column which contains a comma separated string of attr

Answer 1

How about something that places an 'X' in the feature column if the product has that feature.

The below creates a list of unique features ('Steel', 'Red', etc.), then creates a column for each feature in the original df. Then we iterate through each row and for each product feature, we place an 'X' in the cell.

ml = []  

a = [ml.append(item) for l in df.DESCRIPTION for item in l]

unique_list_of_attributes = list(set(ml)) # unique features list

# place empty columns in original df for each feature
df = pd.concat([df,pd.DataFrame(columns=unique_list_of_attributes)]).fillna(value='')

# add 'X' in column if product has feature
for row in df.iterrows():
    for attribute in row[1]['DESCRIPTION']:
        df.loc[row[0],attribute] = 'X'

updated with example output:

    PRODUCTS       DATE                 DESCRIPTION Blue HighHardness  \
0  Product A  2016-9-12  [Steel, Red, HighHardness]                 X   
1  Product B  2016-9-11  [Blue, Lightweight, Steel]    X                
2  Product C  2016-9-12                       [Red]                     

  Lightweight Red Steel  
0               X     X  
1           X         X  
2               X