Use the squeeze function that will remove one dimension from the dataframe:
df[df["location"] == "c"].squeeze()
Out[5]:
date 20130102
location c
Name: 2, dtype: object
DataFrame.squeeze method acts the same way of the squeeze argument of the read_csv function when set to True: if the resulting dataframe is a 1-len dataframe, i.e. it has only one dimension (a column or a row), then the object is squeezed down to the smaller dimension object.
In your case, you get a Series object from the DataFrame. The same logic applies if you squeeze a Panel down to a DataFrame.
squeeze is explicit in your code and shows clearly your intent to “cast down” the object in hands because its dimension can be projected to a smaller one.
If the dataframe has more than one column or row, squeeze has no effect.