Splitting dataframe column where the dtype is Object but inside it there is list , how to split?

Question

I have dataframe where a column named teams which the dtype is "O"(str) but inside it there is list: eg: "['Australia', 'Sri Lanka']" Now i want to split this two team names into two columns, how to do it?

Answer 1

Let's take this example with both types of object columns.

df = pd.DataFrame({'list_col':[['Aaaaa','Bbbbb'],['Scott','Boston']],
                   'str_col':["[Ccccc,Ddddd]","[Scott,Boston]"]})

print(df)

Output:

          list_col         str_col
0   [Aaaaa, Bbbbb]   [Ccccc,Ddddd]
1  [Scott, Boston]  [Scott,Boston]

With df.info():

<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
RangeIndex: 2 entries, 0 to 1
Data columns (total 2 columns):
 #   Column    Non-Null Count  Dtype 
---  ------    --------------  ----- 
 0   list_col  2 non-null      object
 1   str_col   2 non-null      object
dtypes: object(2)
memory usage: 160.0+ bytes

The both look the same, now:

type(df.iloc[0,0]) returns list

type(df.iloc[0,1]) returns str

Let's separate like this:

df['str_col'].str.strip('\[|\]').str.split(',',expand=True)

       0       1
0  Ccccc   Ddddd
1  Scott  Boston

Or like this:

dfe = df[['list_col']].explode('list_col')
dfe.set_index(dfe.groupby(level=0).cumcount(), append=True)['list_col'].unstack()

       0       1
0  Aaaaa   Bbbbb
1  Scott  Boston