best way to implement a deck for a card game in python

Question

What is the best way to store the cards and suits in python so that I can hold a reference to these values in another variable?

For example, if I have a list called hand (cards in players hand), how could I hold values that could refer to the names of suits and values of specific cards, and how would these names and values of suits and cards be stored?

Answer 1

Poker servers tend to use a 2-character string to identify each card, which is nice because it's easy to deal with programmatically and just as easy to read for a human.

>>> import random
>>> import itertools
>>> SUITS = 'cdhs'
>>> RANKS = '23456789TJQKA'
>>> DECK = tuple(''.join(card) for card in itertools.product(RANKS, SUITS))
>>> hand = random.sample(DECK, 5)
>>> print hand
['Kh', 'Kc', '6c', '7d', '3d']

Edit: This is actually straight from a poker module I wrote to evaluate poker hands, you can see more here: http://pastebin.com/mzNmCdV5

Answer 2

The simplest thing would be to use a list of tuples, where the cards are ints and the suits are strings:

hand = [(1, 'spade'), (10, 'club'), ...]

But simplest may not be what you want. Maybe you want a class to represent a card:

class Card:
    def __init__(self, rank, suit):
        self.rank = rank
        self.suit = suit

    def __repr__(self):
        letters = {1:'A', 11:'J', 12:'Q', 13:'K'}
        letter = letters.get(self.rank, str(self.rank))
        return "<Card %s %s>" % (letter, self.suit)

hand = [Card(1, 'spade'), Card(10, 'club')]