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

Here is a similar factorizing solution with collections.defaultdict and itertools.count:

import itertools as it
import collections as ct


names = ['ll', 'll', 'hl', 'hl', 'LL', 'LL', 'LL', 'HL', 'll']

dd = ct.defaultdict(it.count().__next__)
[dd[i] for i in names]
# [0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 0]

Every new occurrence calls the next integer in itertools.count and adds new entry to dd.