I have a dataset with character ID which I want to convert to numeric one. I know I can type out each character ID and recode them, but because I don't care about using specific numbers is there a faster way to just randomly pick an unique number for each character ID? Example below:
ID
1_1_1_aa
1_1_2_aa
1_1_3_aa
1_2_1_aa
1_2_2_aa
1_2_3_aa
1_1_1_bb
1_1_2_bb
1_1_3_bb
1_2_1_bb
1_2_2_bb
1_2_3_bb
Here is what I want"
ID
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
I have a lot more character IDs and so I don't want to type them all out and use recode
. How to do this more efficiently? Any help is greatly appreciated!