How to split value column and append it into dataframe pandas?

Question

Example Problem

df =
       variant    variant_param    variant_new
  0        car    petro / young            Nan
  1       bike     fred / trail            NaN
  2     bottle              Nan            NaN

Then is it possible to convert it using df.loc[:,'variant':'variant_param'].fillna(method='ffill',axis=1)['variant_param'] But from my code I only get like this

df =
       variant    variant_param    variant_new
  0        car    petro / young  petro / young
  1       bike     fred / trail    red / trail
  2     bottle              Nan         bottle

However, I need my dataframe into like this

df =
       variant    variant_param    variant_new
  0        car    petro / young          petro
  1        car    petro / young          young
  2       bike     fred / trail           fred
  3       bike     fred / trail          trail
  4     bottle              Nan         bottle

Answer 1

Try with

df['new'] = df['variant_param'].str.split(' / ')
df = df.explode('new')