pandas split list into columns with regex

Question

I have a string list:

content
01/09/15, 10:07 - message1
01/09/15, 10:32 - message2
01/09/15, 10:44 - message3

I want a data frame, like:

Answer 1

You can use str.extract - where named groups can become column names

In [5827]: df['content'].str.extract('(?P[\s\S]+) - (?P[\s\S]+)', 
                                     expand=True)
Out[5827]:
              date   message
0  01/09/15, 10:07  message1
1  01/09/15, 10:32  message2
2  01/09/15, 10:44  message3

---

Details

In [5828]: df
Out[5828]:
                      content
0  01/09/15, 10:07 - message1
1  01/09/15, 10:32 - message2
2  01/09/15, 10:44 - message3