How replace text value of variable with number

[hiddd dev]

So I have a variable education that has lots of values in text specifying 'bachelor 1', 'bachelor 2' and 'bachelor 3' for each respondent. However, I want to change them to respectively 1, 2 and 3 so that I can adequately use the variable in a regression analysis.

How can I replace these text variables with specific numbers? (Note: stata says that the text values are numerical, which I do find rather weird)

[Nick Cox]

help encode

[William Lisowski]

(Note: stata says that the text values are numerical, which I do find rather weird)

This suggests that your data are already encoded with value labels. Here is an example of such a variable from a dataset included with Stata.

. sysuse auto, clear
(1978 automobile data)

. describe foreign

Variable      Storage   Display    Value
    name         type    format    label      Variable label
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
foreign         byte    %8.0g      origin     Car origin

. tab foreign

 Car origin |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
   Domestic |         52       70.27       70.27
    Foreign |         22       29.73      100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
      Total |         74      100.00

. tab foreign, nolabel

 Car origin |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
          0 |         52       70.27       70.27
          1 |         22       29.73      100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
      Total |         74      100.00

. label list origin
origin:
           0 Domestic
           1 Foreign

.