How to get a value from a cell of a dataframe?

If you have a DataFrame with only one row, then access the first (only) row as a Series using iloc, and then the value using the column name:

In [3]: sub_df
Out[3]:
          A         B
2 -0.133653 -0.030854

In [4]: sub_df.iloc[0]
Out[4]:
A   -0.133653
B   -0.030854
Name: 2, dtype: float64

In [5]: sub_df.iloc[0]['A']
Out[5]: -0.13365288513107493

These are fast access for scalars

In [15]: df = pandas.DataFrame(numpy.random.randn(5,3),columns=list('ABC'))

In [16]: df
Out[16]: 
          A         B         C
0 -0.074172 -0.090626  0.038272
1 -0.128545  0.762088 -0.714816
2  0.201498 -0.734963  0.558397
3  1.563307 -1.186415  0.848246
4  0.205171  0.962514  0.037709

In [17]: df.iat[0,0]
Out[17]: -0.074171888537611502

In [18]: df.at[0,'A']
Out[18]: -0.074171888537611502

You can turn your 1x1 dataframe into a numpy array, then access the first and only value of that array:

val = d2['col_name'].values[0]