I have a pandas dataframe in which one column of text strings contains comma-separated values. I want to split each CSV field and create a new row per entry (as         
        
Similar question as: pandas: How do I split text in a column into multiple rows?
You could do:
>> a=pd.DataFrame({"var1":"a,b,c d,e,f".split(),"var2":[1,2]})
>> s = a.var1.str.split(",").apply(pd.Series, 1).stack()
>> s.index = s.index.droplevel(-1)
>> del a['var1']
>> a.join(s)
   var2 var1
0     1    a
0     1    b
0     1    c
1     2    d
1     2    e
1     2    f