Pandas Dataframe, How can I split a column into two by “,” when some rows may have more than 1 “,”

Question

I have a dataframe. One of the columns is a combination of CITY and STATE . I want to split this column to two columns, CITY and STATE using:

df['CITY'],df['STATE'] = df['WORKSITE'].str.split(",")

And I got this error:

ValueError Traceback (most recent call last) in () ----> 1 df['CITY'],df['STATE'] = df['WORKSITE'].str.split(",")

ValueError: too many values to unpack (expected 2)

So, I'm wondering is there a method that I can ignore the exceptions or detect which row is not working?

Answer 1

Set n=2 in the split call and use the str method effectively:

import pandas as pd

x = ['New York, NY', 'Los Angeles, CA', 'Kansas City, KS, US']

df = pd.DataFrame(x, columns=['WORKSITE'])

df['CITY'], df['STATE'] = df['WORKSITE'].str.split(',', 2).str[0:2].str

print df

Output

              WORKSITE         CITY STATE
0         New York, NY     New York    NY
1      Los Angeles, CA  Los Angeles    CA
2  Kansas City, KS, US  Kansas City    KS

I got some help from looking at this answer to this question .