pandas: How do I split text in a column into multiple rows?

Question

I\'m working with a large csv file and the next to last column has a string of text that I want to split by a specific delimiter. I was wondering if there is a simple way to

Answer 1

It may be late to answer this question but I hope to document 2 good features from Pandas: pandas.Series.str.split() with regular expression and pandas.Series.explode().

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

df = pd.DataFrame(
    {'CustNum': [32363, 31316],
     'CustomerName': ['McCartney, Paul', 'Lennon, John'],
     'ItemQty': [3, 25],
     'Item': ['F04', 'F01'],
     'Seatblocks': ['2:218:10:4,6', '1:13:36:1,12 1:13:37:1,13'],
     'ItemExt': [60, 360]
    }
)

print(df)
print('-'*80+'\n')

df['Seatblocks'] = df['Seatblocks'].str.split('[ :]')
df = df.explode('Seatblocks').reset_index(drop=True)
cols = list(df.columns)
cols.append(cols.pop(cols.index('CustomerName')))
df = df[cols]


print(df)
print('='*80+'\n')
print(df[df['CustomerName'] == 'Lennon, John'])

The output is:

   CustNum     CustomerName  ItemQty Item                 Seatblocks  ItemExt
0    32363  McCartney, Paul        3  F04               2:218:10:4,6       60
1    31316     Lennon, John       25  F01  1:13:36:1,12 1:13:37:1,13      360
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    CustNum  ItemQty Item Seatblocks  ItemExt     CustomerName
0     32363        3  F04          2       60  McCartney, Paul
1     32363        3  F04        218       60  McCartney, Paul
2     32363        3  F04         10       60  McCartney, Paul
3     32363        3  F04        4,6       60  McCartney, Paul
4     31316       25  F01          1      360     Lennon, John
5     31316       25  F01         13      360     Lennon, John
6     31316       25  F01         36      360     Lennon, John
7     31316       25  F01       1,12      360     Lennon, John
8     31316       25  F01          1      360     Lennon, John
9     31316       25  F01         13      360     Lennon, John
10    31316       25  F01         37      360     Lennon, John
11    31316       25  F01       1,13      360     Lennon, John
================================================================================

    CustNum  ItemQty Item Seatblocks  ItemExt  CustomerName
4     31316       25  F01          1      360  Lennon, John
5     31316       25  F01         13      360  Lennon, John
6     31316       25  F01         36      360  Lennon, John
7     31316       25  F01       1,12      360  Lennon, John
8     31316       25  F01          1      360  Lennon, John
9     31316       25  F01         13      360  Lennon, John
10    31316       25  F01         37      360  Lennon, John
11    31316       25  F01       1,13      360  Lennon, John