minizinc constraint solving with large string data

Question

I'm working on a Highschool scheduling project with Minizinc. I have a list of teachers, classes, rooms, times, and events all of type string and a list of duration of type integer. I found on stackoverflow that I need to represent these data with numbers but my data is large. How do I go about this without manually converting each one of them? Thank you

Answer 1

Unfortunately, MiniZinc don't have any tools to convert strings to data in the appropriate format, so I'm afraid that you have to convert it with some tool outside MiniZinc.

If you know any high level programming languages such as Perl, Python, or Ruby it shouldn't be too hard.