Simple method to translate text to numbers giving a different number to every different text.

text_to_numeric.py

def text_to_number(text_array):
    """
    @param text_array: Numpy array of strings.
    @return: Numpy array of integers. Each different input string will be
             assigned a different incremental number.
    """
    vectorizer = CountVectorizer()
    X = vectorizer.fit_transform(text_array).toarray()
    return X.argmax(1)


def main():
    sample_text = \
"""barcelona
madrid
barcelona
bilbao
valencia
sabadell"""

    text = np.array(sample_text.split("\n"))

    X = text_to_number(text)

    pprint(X)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()