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

Use str.split by \s+-\s+ - \s+ is one or more whitespaces:

df[['date','message']] = df['content'].str.split('\s+-\s+', expand=True)
print (df)
                      content             date   message
0  01/09/15, 10:07 - message1  01/09/15, 10:07  message1
1  01/09/15, 10:32 - message2  01/09/15, 10:32  message2
2  01/09/15, 10:44 - message3  01/09/15, 10:44  message3

If need remove content column add DataFrame.pop:

df[['date','message']] = df.pop('content').str.split('\s+-\s+', expand=True)

print (df)
              date   message
0  01/09/15, 10:07  message1
1  01/09/15, 10:32  message2
2  01/09/15, 10:44  message3