title: Does random forest machine learn support string character?
body: <p>I have some data like below:</p>
  
  <pre><code>username, password, valid
  kramer, abcd1234, 1
  dan,123123123,0
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>as you can see the character of the data can be string. So scikit-learn.RandomForestClassifier return error like </p>
  
  <pre><code>ValueError: could not convert string to float: 'hEZ7P|N*Akem'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am considering two solutions.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>change string to float since they can be represented by ASCII</li>
  <li>find another algothrim which support string feature.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Which one is better? Can you give some suggestion?</p>