Many ways to do that

1

In [7]: d.sales[d.sales==24] = 100

In [8]: d
Out[8]: 
   day     flavour  sales  year
0  sat  strawberry     10  2008
1  sun  strawberry     12  2008
2  sat      banana     22  2008
3  sun      banana     23  2008
4  sat  strawberry     11  2009
5  sun  strawberry     13  2009
6  sat      banana     23  2009
7  sun      banana    100  2009

2

In [26]: d.loc[d.sales == 12, 'sales'] = 99

In [27]: d
Out[27]: 
   day     flavour  sales  year
0  sat  strawberry     10  2008
1  sun  strawberry     99  2008
2  sat      banana     22  2008
3  sun      banana     23  2008
4  sat  strawberry     11  2009
5  sun  strawberry     13  2009
6  sat      banana     23  2009
7  sun      banana    100  2009

3

In [28]: d.sales = d.sales.replace(23, 24)

In [29]: d
Out[29]: 
   day     flavour  sales  year
0  sat  strawberry     10  2008
1  sun  strawberry     99  2008
2  sat      banana     22  2008
3  sun      banana     24  2008
4  sat  strawberry     11  2009
5  sun  strawberry     13  2009
6  sat      banana     24  2009
7  sun      banana    100  2009

Aha! For some reason, when I named a variable that pointed to a value in a data frame, and then tried to use the variable to put it back into the table replacing other cells, it changed the data type. That's why I was getting NaNs. I just had to convert it to a usable type using tolist.

As for the nearest-value identification, this seems to have worked:

Pfinal = df.iloc[(df['P']-Plithos).abs().idxmin()]

F_max = Pfinal[1]

F_max = F_max.tolist()

df.loc[(df['P'] < Plithos),['F']] = F_max