constructing identifiers for a large panel data

Dear all,

I have a panel data of 180 countries covering the period 2000-2010.

Here is a sample:

 list={'Australia' 
    'Cameroon'
    'Canada'
    'Colombia'
    'Costa Rica'
    'Denmark'
    'Dominican Republic'
    'Ecuador'
    'Egypt'
    'Fin' 
    'Israel'
    'Italy'
    'Japan'
    'Kenya'
    'Korea South'
    'Madagascar'
    'Malawi'
    'Malaysia'
    'Mexico'
    'Morocco'
    'Netherlands'
    'New Zealand'
    'Norway'
    'Peru'
    'Philippines'
    'Portugal'
    'Senegal'
    'Singapore'
    'South Africa'};

I want to construct identifiers, that is Austalia to take the value of 1 over the period 2000-2010, Camerron the value of 2, etc.,. Is there a code for doing quickly (with few lines of code)?

Many thanks

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Well you could just do

numberedList = 1 : length(list);

or you could look into the function called categorical() in the Stats toolbox. Or the function ismember() in base MATLAB. Not exactly sure what your intent is so I can't provide a definitive answer.