title: Unpacking unknown object from within DataFrame
body: <p>Newbie here. I have a dataframe which contains an object I don't recognise, which I need to unpack and convert into a new separate dataframe, to form a new normalised structure.</p>
  
  <p>A simplified version of the df is;</p>
  
  <pre><code>   trasaction_id   customer_details
  0   1       &lt;customer {id:'A123', name: 'Tina'} as x &gt;
  0   2       &lt;customer {id:'B456', name: 'Tony'} as x &gt;
  0   3       &lt;customer {id:'C789', name: 'Tim'} as x &gt;
  
  Name: customer_details, dtype: object
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I can't seem to access the dictionary within the object inside of the angle brackets. I've tried all sorts of things, if I try <code>print(df['customer_details].__dict__</code> I get the following: <code>{'_is_copy': None, '_data': SingleBlockManager</code>.</p>
  
  <p>I've even tried to do something hacky like this string manipulator, but I'm sure there's something basic I'm missing through being new to this.
  <code>'{' + df['customer_details'].apply(lambda st: st[st.find("{")+1:st.find("}")]) + '}'</code></p>
  
  <p>Ultimately what I'm trying to achieve is to unnest these customer_details into a separate df linked by the transaction_id and store it in a simple normalised structure in an RDB. I believe in order to use a standard tool like json.dumps() etc I want it to look like this (with each element double quoted);</p>
  
  <pre><code>    transaction_id   customer_details
  0    1        {id:'A123', name: 'Tina'}
  0    2        {id:'B456', name: 'Tony'}
  0    3        {id:'C789', name: 'Tim'}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This is driving me mad. Thanks for your help!</p>