Convert String values to numeric

Hello,

I am an IT student, new to KNIME and machine learning.

I would like to run different type of machine learning methods on the same data set (imbalanced) to see which performs better, then do different kinds of preprocessing, run all the methods again and compare results.

There are different types of attributes in the data, many of them are text values but in a limited ranges like male/female, yes/no, C34.1/C34.2/C34.3.

As far as I understand to use SVM I need to provide only numerical values so that vectors can be calculated. How can I convert all text columns to numeric ones eg. male/female to 0/1 and C34.1/C34.2/C34.3 to 1/2/3?

Sylwia