Split string into multiple columns per character in Pandas

Question

I have a column where a string of characters represents a monthly series of events.

A str.split method would be ideal but I can't find the right pattern, regex or otherwise, to split on each character.

Col Foo
 BBBAAAAAR

into

Col Foo_1 | Col Foo_2 | Col Foo_3 | Col Foo_4 ...
B         |B          |B          |A          ...

I currently do it on a loop:

for keys, frames in data_frame_dict.items():
   temp1 = frames.Col_Foo.str.split(' ',expand=True).add_prefix('Feat_Mon_') 

and then append...

Which works for spaces, but I want every character in a column, which right now has no separation between each element.

But I can't find the method pattern that works for a string of characters either here or in the docs.

EDIT: I have already tried '' as a separator and it returns the right amount of columns, but they're all empty. Its as if its splitting on each character and returning the empty space between characters.

Answer 1

If you want to split by character, and the column is type object, you only need to do what you are doing but use the empty '' instead of ' ' as an argument to str.split. This will split the word into all characters.

so the following code should work.

frame['Col Foo'].str.split('',expand=True)

Answer 2

Are they all the same length? I believe you could convert your Col Foo to a string and then just iterate through the string by character. If they're all the same length, you could hardcode it to a df without a loop. *Sorry, would've been a comment but I don't have the rep to comment