Data structure that represents a deck of cards

Question

Data structure that represents a deck of cards

Navigation

#1 by (7 votes)

4

I'm developing a project in Python where I have to play a card game. I am doubtful as to what the best data structure to use, according to the description provided:

Each letter must be represented by a pair (,), in which both elements are strings. The possible faces are: 'A', '2', '3', ..., '10', 'J', 'Q', 'K'. The suits are: 'O', 'P', 'C' and 'E'.

For example:

The Ace of Spades is represented by the pair ('A', 'E');
The Lady of Clubs, by the pair ('Q', 'P');

A complete deck is a list of the 52 existing cards. A hand is also a list of cards. The game has several rounds, in each round a new deck is used, whose sequence of cards should be read
of a file 'baralho_.txt', where it must be replaced by the number of the round. Where the hand is the set of two cards a player has at a given time. I'm new to the Python world, I do not know which one is most suitable. The deck could be a dictionary but then I can not represent the hand.

Excerpt from the file of the deck:

10 C
8 C
A P
2 P
7 P
4 C
10 O
7 E
9 E
8 E

python python-3.x

asked by anonymous 07.12.2017 / 14:05

1 answer

Saving the same file at the same time on different threads What are the acronyms DDL, DML, DQL, DTL and DCL?

score 7 · Accepted Answer

One option is to use collections.namedtuples :

from collections import namedtuple
from itertools import product

Carta = namedtuple('Carta', ['face', 'naipe'])

faces = {'A', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '9', '10', 'J', 'Q', 'K'}
naipes = {'O', 'P', 'C', 'E'}

baralho = [Carta(face, naipe) for face, naipe in product(faces, naipes)]

print('Seu baralho possui', len(baralho), 'cartas')
# Seu baralho possui 52 cartas

See working at Ideone | Repl.it

To generate all the cards in the deck, I used itertools.product . So, for each card in the deck you can do, for example:

carta = baralho[0]
print(carta.face, carta.naipe)

Displaying the face and suit of the respective card.

To randomly draw two cards for a player, you can use the random.sample :

from random import sample

mao = sample(baralho, 2)

print('Mão do jogador:', mao)
# Mão do jogador: [Carta(face='Q', naipe='O'), Carta(face='A', naipe='P')]

See working at Ideone | Repl.it

Given the new information about the deck being stored in a file, the logic does not differ much, only, instead of generating all possible cards, read them from the respective file. Assuming the file is named baralho1.txt , the definition of the deck would look something like:

from collections import namedtuple

Carta = namedtuple('Carta', ['face', 'naipe'])

baralho = []
with open('baralho1.txt') as ficheiro:
    for linha in ficheiro:
        carta = linha.strip().split()
        baralho.append(Carta(*carta))

See working at Repl.it

Thus, the baralho object will be a list of Carta tuples following the values that were stored in the file. For the file excerpt given in the question, the result of print(baralho) would be:

[
  Carta(face='10', naipe='C'),
  Carta(face='8', naipe='C'),
  Carta(face='A', naipe='P'),
  Carta(face='2', naipe='P'),
  Carta(face='7', naipe='P'),
  Carta(face='4', naipe='C'),
  Carta(face='10', naipe='O'),
  Carta(face='7', naipe='E'),
  Carta(face='9', naipe='E'),
  Carta(face='8', naipe='E')
]

You can shuffle the cards using the random.shuffle function:

random.shuffle(baralho)

And then you could, for example, distribute the card between four players:

jogador_a = baralho[0:2]
jogador_b = baralho[2:4]
jogador_c = baralho[4:6]
jogador_d = baralho[6:8]

See working at Repl.it

Getting each one with 2 different cards. Obviously the process of distributing the cards can be modified according to your need and even the way to represent the player if there are other requirements to be satisfied.