How can I split a dataframe into multiple columns when my column header has \ in the name?

Question

I have a dataframe called ratings. It is a single column, named "tconst\taverageRating\tnumVotes", although it needs to be split into 3, separated by "\".

I understand that this statement can be used: ratings[['tconst','taverageRating','tnumVotes']] = ratings.???.str.split("\",expand=True,)

However, when I replace??? with the actual column name, I get an error. I believe this is because of the \s in the column header.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Are you sure you are reading the data in correctly? Looking at the header names, it looks likely that your data is actually \t ie tab separated (so, \t and numVotes make sense separately). In that case you should read your data like this:

pd.read_csv('http://language.media.mit.edu/data/public/unesco_langlang_20120722_iso639-3.txt', sep='\t')