Splitting strings of tuples of different lengths to columns in Pandas DF

Question

I have a dataframe that looks like this

id	human_id
1	('apples', '2022-12-04', 'a5ted')
2	('bananas', '2012-2-14')
3	('2012-2-14', 'reda21', 'ss')
..	..

I would like a "pythonic" way to have such output

id	human_id	col1	col2	col3
1	('apples', '2022-12-04', 'a5ted')	apples	2022-12-04	a5ted
2	('bananas', '2012-2-14')	bananas	2022-12-04	np.NaN
3	('2012-2-14', 'reda21', 'ss')	2012-2-14	reda21	ss

import pandas as pd

df['a'], df['b'], df['c'] = df.human_id.str

The code I have tried give me error:

ValueError: not enough values to unpack (expected 2, got 1) Python

How can I split the values in tuple to be in columns?

Thank you.

Answer 1

You can do it this way. It will just put None in places where it couldn't find the values. You can then append the df1 to df.

d = {'id': [1,2,3], 
     'human_id': ["('apples', '2022-12-04', 'a5ted')", 
                  "('bananas', '2012-2-14')",
                  "('2012-2-14', 'reda21', 'ss')"
                 ]}

df = pd.DataFrame(data=d)

list_human_id = tuple(list(df['human_id']))

newList = []
for val in listh:
    newList.append(eval(val))

df1 = pd.DataFrame(newList, columns=['col1', 'col2', 'col3'])

print(df1)

Output


        col1        col2   col3
0     apples  2022-12-04  a5ted
1    bananas   2012-2-14   None
2  2012-2-14      reda21     ss