Pandas column of lists, create a row for each list element

Question

I have a dataframe where some cells contain lists of multiple values. Rather than storing multiple values in a cell, I\'d like to expand the dataframe so that each item in t

Answer 1

Pandas >= 0.25

Series and DataFrame methods define a .explode() method that explodes lists into separate rows. See the docs section on Exploding a list-like column.

df = pd.DataFrame({
    'var1': [['a', 'b', 'c'], ['d', 'e',], [], np.nan], 
    'var2': [1, 2, 3, 4]
})
df
        var1  var2
0  [a, b, c]     1
1     [d, e]     2
2         []     3
3        NaN     4

df.explode('var1')

  var1  var2
0    a     1
0    b     1
0    c     1
1    d     2
1    e     2
2  NaN     3  # empty list converted to NaN
3  NaN     4  # NaN entry preserved as-is

# to reset the index to be monotonically increasing...
df.explode('var1').reset_index(drop=True)

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

Note that this also handles mixed columns of lists and scalars, as well as empty lists and NaNs appropriately (this is a drawback of repeat-based solutions).

However, you should note that explode only works on a single column (for now).

P.S.: if you are looking to explode a column of strings, you need to split on a separator first, then use explode. See this (very much) related answer by me.