pandas DataFrame: normalize one JSON column and merge with other columns

Question

I have a pandas DataFrame containing one column with multiple JSON data items as list of dicts. I want to normalize the JSON column and duplicate the non-JSON columns:

Answer 1

You can use concat with dict comprehension with pop for extract column, remove second level and join to original:

df1 = (pd.concat({i: pd.DataFrame(x) for i, x in df_actions.pop('actions').items()})
         .reset_index(level=1, drop=True)
         .join(df_actions)
         .reset_index(drop=True))

What is same as:

df1 = (pd.concat({i: json_normalize(x) for i, x in df_actions.pop('actions').items()})
         .reset_index(level=1, drop=True)
         .join(df_actions)
         .reset_index(drop=True))

---

print (df1)
  type value  id
0    a    17  12
1    b    19  12
2    a     1  15
3    b     3  15
4    c     5  15