How do I split a string into several columns in a dataframe with pandas Python?

Question

I am aware of the following questions:

1.) How to split a column based on several string indices using pandas? 2.) How do I split text in a column into multiple rows

Answer 1

The str.split method has an expand argument:

>>> df['string'].str.split(',', expand=True)
         0        1         2
0  astring      isa    string
1  another   string        la
2      123      232   another
>>>

With column names:

>>> df['string'].str.split(',', expand=True).rename(columns = lambda x: "string"+str(x+1))
   string1  string2   string3
0  astring      isa    string
1  another   string        la
2      123      232   another

Much neater with Python >= 3.6 f-strings:

>>> (df['string'].str.split(',', expand=True)
...              .rename(columns=lambda x: f"string_{x+1}"))
  string_1 string_2  string_3
0  astring      isa    string
1  another   string        la
2      123      232   another

Answer 2

Slightly less concise than the expand option, but here is an alternative way:

In [29]: cols = ['string_1', 'string_2', 'string_3']   

In [30]: pandas.DataFrame(df.string.str.split(', ').tolist(), columns=cols)
Out[30]: 
  string_1 string_2 string_3
0  astring      isa   string
1  another   string       la
2      123      232  another