Python: How to compare elements within an array of cards

Question

I am working on a texas hold-em game in python, and am looking to traverse an array containing a complete hand of 7 cards (2 in the hole + 5 on the board). The array contains elements of class Cards, where the Card class constructor is

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

So, I have a "hand" array within a "Player" class of 7 random cards, where the suit is one of 4 strings (spade, club, heart, diamond) and the value is one of 9 numbers (2-10) or 4 strings (jack-ace). I want to traverse the array to check if the list contains any of the hands in poker, but I'm failing to figure out how I can "extract" the suit/value of the cards from my array. I've started a method within my "Player" class to check for a suit, here that suit is a spade.

class Player:
    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name
        self.pocket = []
        self.hand = []

    def spadeChecker(self):
        card = Card("Blank", 0)
        for i in self.hand:
            card = self.hand[i]
            if(card.suit == "Spade"):
                print("Hi! you have a spade!")
            else:
                pass

When running the program from my terminal I receive a TypeError message:

in spadeChecker card = self.hand[i] TypeError: list indices must be integers or slices, not Card

I know my method is pretty bad but I'm very new to this and just can't figure out how to get it to work. Any advice?

Thanks

Good description, but your code is missing some classes like Card. Please show a working piece of code you wrote so we can copy paste and run it and answer more easily. See MRE here: https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example — Malo, Mar 09 '21 at 07:03

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 09 '21 at 13:12

Here is the rewritten method, including an example with a 3 card hand.

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

class Player:
    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name
        self.pocket = []
        self.hand = [Card("Heart", 10), Card("Spade", 10), Card("Diamond", 10)]

    def spadeChecker(self):
        for card in self.hand:
            if(card.suit == "Spade"):
                print("Hi! you have a spade!")
                #return True
            else:
                #return False
                pass

p = Player("Bob")
p.spadeChecker()

Output is:

Hi! you have a spade!

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 09 '21 at 02:18

In your code, your iterator is i and your iterable is self.hand, which is a list of Card objects. Thus, i will be a Card object each time the loop iterates. If you want to be able to get the index of the Card object as well as the Card object itself, I recommend using the enumerate() function. However, since you only reference the Card objects, you can just get the suit attribute directly.

class Player:
    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name
        self.pocket = []
        self.hand = []

    def spadeChecker(self):
        card = Card("Blank", 0)
        for card_obj in self.hand:
            if(card_obj.suit == "Spade"):
                print("Hi! you have a spade!")
            else:
                pass

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 26 '22 at 14:15

There's a Python library for generating, comparing & evaluating poker hands called tilted which can be found here: https://github.com/MaxAtkinson/tilted

I've used it myself before and it's really easy. This may allow you to avoid having to implement it yourself.

Python: How to compare elements within an array of cards

3 Answers3