Feature Selection in dataset containing both string and numerical values?
I've used Weka Feature Selection and although the attribute evaluator methods I've tried can't handle string attributes you can temporary remove them in the Preprocess > Filter > Unsupervised > Attribute > RemoveType, then perform the feature selection and, later, include strings again to do the classification.
Hi I have big dataset which has both strings and numerical values
ex.
User name (str) ,  handset(str), number of requests(int), number of downloads(int) ,.......
I have around 200 such columns. 
Is there a way/algorithm which can handle both strings and integers during feature selection ?
Or how should I approach this issue.
thanks