Splitting Column with Delimiter Appearing more than Once-CodePudding

I have the following line in my code where I'm taking a string and splitting it based on a delimiter:

task_df[['Project','Section']] = task_df.Projects.str.split(": ",expand=True)
#sample Projects = Rob's Project: Untitled Section

But I'm running into issues whenever someone adds a Project or Section name that also contains my delimiter ex. Project X: Section: Rob

error: ValueError: Columns must be same length as key

NOTE: Sometimes the duplicate : will be in the project, but most times it's in the Section Name

How would I account for this in my code? Is there any way to cleanly avoid this from being an error? If not, how can I make it just remove those that would cause the error?

CodePudding user response：

IIUC, you need only the first and second part, if the same sep exists more than once, they should be joined by the same sep. Therefore:

  task_df['Project'] = task_df['Projects'].str.split(": ").str[0]
  task_df['Section'] = task_df['Projects'].str.split(": ").str[1:].map(lambda x: ": ".join(x))

For this dataset:

                          Projects
0  Rob's Project: Untitled Section
1         Project X:  Section: Rob

This is the output:

                          Projects        Project           Section
0  Rob's Project: Untitled Section  Rob's Project  Untitled Section
1         Project X:  Section: Rob      Project X      Section: Rob