Create multiple-columns pandas dataframe from list - pandas

Question

I can't figure out how to create pandas dataframe (multiple-columns) from list. Some lines contains character ">" at the beggining. I want them to be column headers. Number of lines after each header is not the same.
My list:
>header
a
b
>header2
c
d
e
f
>header3
g
h
i
Dataframe I want to create:
>header1 >header2 >header3
a c g
b d h
e i
f

Answer 1

Simply iterate through lines and match the headers with '>'. The challenge though is to create a df from a dictionary of lists with unequal size.
# The given list
lines = [">header", "a", "b", ">header2", "c", "d", "e", "f", ">header3", "g", "h", "i"]
# Iterate through the lines and create a sublist for each header
data = {}
column = ''
for line in lines:
if line.startswith('>'):
column = line
data[column] = []
continue
data[column].append(line)
# Create the DataFrame
df = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(data,orient='index').T
output:
>header >header2 >header3
0 a c g
1 b d h
2 None e i
3 None f None

Answer 2

I'm assuming you have a text with this list. You can use str.splitlines() to split it and then construct the dataframe with help of itertools.zip_longest:
from itertools import zip_longest
text = '''\
>header
a
b
>header2
c
d
e
f
>header3
g
h
i'''
current, data = None, {}
for line in text.splitlines():
line = line.strip()
if line.startswith('>'):
current = line
else:
data.setdefault(current, []).append(line)
df = pd.DataFrame(zip_longest(*data.values(), fillvalue=''), columns=list(data))
print(df)
Prints:
>header >header2 >header3
0 a c g
1 b d h
2 e i
3 f