title: Access index of last element in data frame
body: <p>I've looking around for this but I can't seem to find it (though it must be extremely trivial).</p>
  
  <p>The problem that I have is that I would like to retrieve the value of a column for the first and last entries of a data frame. But if I do:</p>
  
  <pre><code>df.ix[0]['date']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I get:</p>
  
  <pre><code>datetime.datetime(2011, 1, 10, 16, 0)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but if I do:</p>
  
  <pre><code>df[-1:]['date']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I get:</p>
  
  <pre><code>myIndex
  13         2011-12-20 16:00:00
  Name: mydate
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>with a different format. Ideally, I would like to be able to access the value of the last index of the data frame, but I can't find how.</p>
  
  <p>I even tried to create a column (IndexCopy) with the values of the index and try:</p>
  
  <pre><code>df.ix[df.tail(1)['IndexCopy']]['mydate']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but this also yields a different format (since df.tail(1)['IndexCopy'] does not output a simple integer). </p>
  
  <p>Any ideas? </p>