Label Encoder functionality in R?

Question

In python, scikit has a great function called LabelEncoder that maps categorical levels (strings) to integer representation.

Is there anything in R to do this?

Answer 1

It's hard to believe why no one has mentioned caret's dummyVars function.

This is a widely searched question, and people don't want to write their own methods or copy and paste other users methods, they want a package, and caret is the closest thing to sklearn in R.

EDIT: I now realize that what the user actually want's is to turn strings into a counting number, which is just as.numeric(as.factor(x)) but I'm going to leave this here because using hot-one encoding is the more accurate method of encoding categorical data.