How do I change a single index value in pandas dataframe?

energy.loc['Republic of Korea']

I want to change the value of index from 'Republic of Korea' to 'South Korea'. But the dataframe is too large and it is not possible to change every index value. How do I change only this single value?

@EdChum's solution looks good. Here's one using rename, which would replace all these values in the index.

energy.rename(index={'Republic of Korea':'South Korea'},inplace=True)

Here's an example

>>> example = pd.DataFrame({'key1' : ['a','a','a','b','a','b'],
           'data1' : [1,2,2,3,nan,4],
           'data2' : list('abcdef')})
>>> example.set_index('key1',inplace=True)
>>> example
      data1 data2
key1             
a       1.0     a
a       2.0     b
a       2.0     c
b       3.0     d
a       NaN     e
b       4.0     f

>>> example.rename(index={'a':'c'}) # can also use inplace=True
      data1 data2
key1             
c       1.0     a
c       2.0     b
c       2.0     c
b       3.0     d
c       NaN     e
b       4.0     f

You want to do something like this:

as_list = df.index.tolist()
idx = as_list.index('Republic of Korea')
as_list[idx] = 'South Korea'
df.index = as_list

Basically, you get the index as a list, change that one element, and the replace the existing index.