How do I split a string into several columns in a dataframe with pandas Python?

Question

I am aware of the following questions:

1.) How to split a column based on several string indices using pandas? 2.) How do I split text in a column into multiple rows

Answer 1

Slightly less concise than the expand option, but here is an alternative way:

In [29]: cols = ['string_1', 'string_2', 'string_3']   

In [30]: pandas.DataFrame(df.string.str.split(', ').tolist(), columns=cols)
Out[30]: 
  string_1 string_2 string_3
0  astring      isa   string
1  another   string       la
2      123      232  another