how to unstack or unpivot a pandas dataframe based on conditional row values?

Question

I have a pandas dataframe that looks like this:

But I need to pull out table and chair into their own columns to compare side by side like so:

so the values in amount are zero, and now appear in the new columns.

I am not sure how to unstack conditionally. I can unstack the entire 'furniture' column, but how do I do it for only specific row values?

Answer 1

Let us try get_dummies

df = df.join(df.furniture.where(df.furniture.isin(["table","chair"]),'amount').str.get_dummies().mul(df.pop("amount"),0))
df
Out[87]: 
   CID furniture  amount  chair  table
0    1     couch       2      0      0
1    2     couch       3      0      0
2    2     chair       0      1      0
3    3     table       0      0      3
4    1     chair       0      1      0
5    4      lamp       5      0      0
6    4     chair       0      1      0
7    5     couch       2      0      0
8    2      lamp       5      0      0