Let us assume you need to pick the name from the below table for a particular Id and store that value in a variable.
+-----+-------+
| id | name |
+-----+-------+
| 100 | Alex |
| 200 | Bidan |
| 300 | Cary |
+-----+-------+
SCALA
-----------
Irrelevant data is filtered out first and then the name column is selected and finally stored into name variable
var name = df.filter($"id" === "100").select("name").collect().map(_.getString(0)).mkString("")

PYTHON (PYSPARK)
-----------------------------
For simpler usage, I have created a function that returns the value by passing the dataframe and the desired column name to this (this is spark Dataframe and not Pandas Dataframe). Before passing the dataframe to this function, filter is applied to filter out other records.
def GetValueFromDataframe(_df,columnName):
for row in _df.rdd.collect():
return row[columnName].strip()
name = GetValueFromDataframe(df.filter(df.id == "100"),"name")

There might be more simpler approach than this using 3x version of Python. The code which I showed above was tested for 2.7 version.
Note :
It is most likely to encounter out of memory error (Driver memory) since we use the collect function. Hence it is always recommended to apply transformations (like filter,where etc) before you call the collect function. If you
still encounter with driver out of memory issue, you could pass --conf spark.driver.maxResultSize=0 as command line argument to make use of unlimited driver memory.