How to extract cell from pandas data frame

Question

Say I make a pandas dataframe (I am not good at pandas, and this may not be very efficient):

import pandas as pd
colnames = ['a', 'b']
data = pd.DataFrame(columns=colnames)
df_row = ['val1', 'val2']
app = pd.Series(df_row, index=cols)
data = data.append(app, ignore_index=True)

I want to access val1 as a string, not as a pandas object.

If I do:

cell = data.iloc[[0],[0]]
type(cell)

I see that cell is of type <class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>

If I then do:

type(cell[`a'])

I see that it is <class 'pandas.core.series.Series'>

How can I get val1 as a str object and not a pandas object?

Answer 1

The issue for your case is that you are passing lists to iloc, you need to pass normal integers 0,0 to iloc to get the result you want -

In [85]: data.iloc[0,0]
Out[85]: 'val1'