Splitting a Column of Tuples in a Pandas DataFrame

In Pandas dataframes, splitting a column containing tuples into multiple columns is a common operation. To achieve this, one can adopt the following methods:

Using pd.DataFrame(col.tolist())

This method converts the tuple column into a list of tuples and then creates a new dataframe from it. The index of the new dataframe matches that of the original.

import pandas as pd

# Create a dataframe with a column containing tuples
df = pd.DataFrame({'a': [1, 2], 'b': [(1, 2), (3, 4)]})

# Split the 'b' column into 'b1' and 'b2'
df[['b1', 'b2']] = pd.DataFrame(df['b'].tolist(), index=df.index)

# Print the resulting dataframe
print(df)

Output:

   a  b  b1  b2
0  1  (1, 2)   1   2
1  2  (3, 4)   3   4

Note: Using df['b'].apply(pd.Series) instead of pd.DataFrame(df['b'].tolist(), index=df.index) also works. However, it is slower and requires more memory.