Suppose I have a dataframe with the following format of strings separated by commas: index columnName 0 apple,peach,orange,pear, 1 orange, pear,apple 2 pear 3 peach,apple 4 orange The actual number rows will be greater than 10,000. I want to expand the dataframe and sort the dataframe by row 0. My expected output is below, where None is NoneType: index 0 1 2 3 0 apple peach orange pear 1 apple None orange pear 2 None None None pear 3 apple peach None None 4 None None orange None I have expand the data df= df['columnName'].str.split(',',expand=True) #expand initial dataframe I cannot sort/reorder the data as desired despite trying various combinations of df.sort_values(). Continue reading...