[R] Nominal variables in SVM?

[Noah Silverman]

Hi,

The answers to my previous question about nominal variables has lead me 
to a more important question.

What is the "best practice" way to feed nominal variable to an SVM.

For example:
color = ("red, "blue", "green")

I could translate that into an index so I wind up with
color= (1,2,3)

But my concern is that the SVM will now think that the values are 
numeric in "range" and not discrete conditions.

Another thought would be to create 3 binary variables from the single 
color variable, so I have:

red = (0,1)
blue = (0,1)
green = (0,1)

A example fed to the SVM would have one positive and two negative values 
to indicate the color value:
i.e. for a blue example:
red = 0, blue =1 , green = 0

Or, do any of the SVM packages intelligently handle this internally so 
that I don't have to mess with it.  If so, do I need to be concerned 
about different "translation" of the data if the test data set isn't 
exactly the same as the training set.
For example:
training data  =  color ("red, "blue", "green")
test data = color ("red, "green")

How would I be sure that the "red" and "green" examples get encoded the 
same so that the SVM is accurate?

Thanks in advance!!

-N