Indices of smallest n values over whole Pandas DF

Question

I'm searching for an efficient way to extract the indices of the n smallest values over the whole data frame.

For example, given the following df with n = 2:

    colA    colB    colC
r1   33      75      22
r2    1      52      95
r3   71       7      68

I would like to get, in some form, the indices [(r2, colA), (r3, colB)] corresponding to the 2 smallest values over the whole df: 1 and 7.

The order between the indices is not important (The corresponding values may not be sorted).

Thanks!

Answer 1

In addition to Neo's answer, in the meanwhile, I found the following solution:

n=2
list(df.stack().sort_values().head(n).index)