How do I get information in one column into 2 new columns?-CodePudding

I have a dataframe of teachers and chaperones on a school trip.

Index | Name | Class | Number_Of_Students | Bus_Number

The names in the 'Name' column are listed like: Surname, Mx. Forename MiddleInitial

I am trying to split the 'Name' column into two separate columns: Surname | Forename

This is what I have tried:

ChaperoneName = df['Name']
df = df.assign( Surname = ChaperoneName[0], Forename = ChaperoneName[2])

The idea was if I isolated the one column, I could slice the strings in each row to get the Surname and the Forename into their new respective columns. But this has not worked for me. All I get in return are 2 properly named columns, but with the 0 and 2 indexed names repeating in each row.

CodePudding user response：

Try this:

df['Surname'] = df['Name'].apply(lambda x: x.split(",")[0])
df['Forename'] = df['Name'].apply(lambda x: x.split(",")[1])