Assign a number to each unique value in a list

Question

I have a list of strings. I want to assign a unique number to each string (the exact number is not important), and create a list of the same length using these numbers, in o

Answer 1

Since you are mapping strings to integers, that suggests using a dict. So you can do the following:

d = dict()

counter = 0

for name in names:
    if name in d:
        continue
    d[name] = counter
    counter += 1

numbers = [d[name] for name in names]