Pandas split column of lists into multiple columns

Question

I have a pandas DataFrame with one column:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame(
    data={
        \"teams\": [
            


        

Answer 1

The above solutions didn't work for me since I have nan observations in my dataframe. In my case df2[['team1','team2']] = pd.DataFrame(df2.teams.values.tolist(), index= df2.index) yields:

object of type 'float' has no len()

I solve this using list comprehension. Here the replicable example:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
d1 = {'teams': [['SF', 'NYG'],['SF', 'NYG'],['SF', 'NYG'],
            ['SF', 'NYG'],['SF', 'NYG'],['SF', 'NYG'],['SF', 'NYG']]}
df2 = pd.DataFrame(d1)
df2.loc[2,'teams'] = np.nan
df2.loc[4,'teams'] = np.nan
df2

output:

        teams
0   [SF, NYG]
1   [SF, NYG]
2   NaN
3   [SF, NYG]
4   NaN
5   [SF, NYG]
6   [SF, NYG]

df2['team1']=np.nan
df2['team2']=np.nan

solving with list comprehension:

for i in [0,1]:
    df2['team{}'.format(str(i+1))]=[k[i] if isinstance(k,list) else k for k in df2['teams']]

df2

yields:

    teams   team1   team2
0   [SF, NYG]   SF  NYG
1   [SF, NYG]   SF  NYG
2   NaN        NaN  NaN
3   [SF, NYG]   SF  NYG
4   NaN        NaN  NaN
5   [SF, NYG]   SF  NYG
6   [SF, NYG]   SF  NYG