How to convert cells in a pandas data frame with multiple values to multiple rows?

Question

I am facing an issue while developing a piece of code for the below function. I have a dataframe with the below values

Date	Name	UserId	task	Client	duration
1/2/2022	'Alex, J'	101	'C'	QAT	8
2/2/2022	'Alex, J'	101	'C'	QAT	8
1/2/2022	'Marc, B' 'Marc, B'	102 102	'A' 'B'	App Dev	8
2/2/2022	'Marc, B' 'Marc, B'	102 102	'A' 'B'	App Dev	8

Now, I want to convert to the below dataframe.

Date	Name	UserId	task	Client	duration
1/2/2022	'Alex, J'	101	'C'	QAT	8
2/2/2022	'Alex, J'	101	'A'	QAT	8
1/2/2022	'Marc, B'	102	'A'	App	4
1/2/2022	'Marc, B'	102	'B'	Dev	4
2/2/2022	'Marc, B'	102	'A'	App	4
2/2/2022	'Marc, B'	102	'B'	Dev	4

I want to separate out the values in Name, UserId, task and Client column and want to divide the duration by the number of tasks for a particular day.

For example, I had 2 tasks here ie A and B for the same day(1/2/2022). So i divided the duration of 8 by 2 and got 4 for each A and B.

I would request you to please help me in this. Thanks alot.

Answer 1

The key here is to convert your string in each row to list and then use explode :

# Sample data:
df = pd.DataFrame({'user':['102 102', '103 103'],
                   'task':["'A' 'B'", "'A' 'B'"],
                   'duration':[8, 8]})

# Convert to list 
df['user'] = df['user'].str.split(' ')
df['task'] = df['task'].str.split(' ')

# Split row to multiple rows base on list
df.explode(['user', 'task'])

df

If your string is more complicated to separated, consider using import re . Or you can view it here: How to group by columns and merge only the unique strings of another column which are separated by a delimiter?

I think the rest is easy and you can do it well