Using a simple for loop to match state name with corresponding state number

Question

I web scraped 50 states from a website and added them to my data set under the name "state_name", I need to correspond all the state values 1 with Alabama all state values 2 with Alaska, etc...

Answer 1

df$state_value = as.factor(df$state_name)

Answer 2

You can try

df$state_value <- as.integer(factor(df$state_name))

or

df$state_value <- match(df$state_name,unique(df$state_name))