title: Pandas, convert column of unicodes to column of list of strings
body: <p>One of my pandas dataframe columns has unicodes of this kind <code>u'asd,abc,tre,der34,whatever'</code>. The final results should be a column of lists of strings: <code>['asd','abc','tre','der34','whatever']</code>. A list of unicodes might do, too: <code>[u'asd',u'abc',u'tre',u'der34',u'whatever']</code>.</p>
  
  <p>By the way, tt can happen that in the column of unicodes there is a nan or a u''.</p>
  
  <p>Any suggestion? I know I can do <code>str(df['column'].iloc[0]).split(',')</code> and manually add a new column or do something trickier, but I was looking for something more pythonic.</p>