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

What is the best way to store the cards and suits in python so that I can hold a reference to th开发者_开发百科ese 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?

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

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')]

A deck of cards is comprised of the same range of values (1 - 13) in each of four suits, which suggests a Cartesian product. List comprehension is an elegant, dense syntax for doing this:

values = range(1, 10) + "Jack Queen King".split()
suits = "Diamonds Clubs Hearts Spades".split()

deck_of_cards = ["%s of %s" % (v, s) for v in values for s in suits]

in python 3:

deck_of_cards = ["{0} of {1}".format(v, s) for v in values for s in suits]

That's how they are when you take a brand new deck out of the box; to play you need to shuffle them:

from random import shuffle

shuffle(deck_of_cards)

You could simply use a number, and decide on a mapping between number and "card". For example:

number MOD 13 = face value (after a +1)

number DIV 13 = suit

import collections

C, H, D, S = "CLUBS", "HEARTS", "DICE", "SPADE"
Card = collections.namedtuple("Card", "suit value")

hand = []

hand.append(Card(C, 3))
hand.append(Card(H, "A"))
hand.append(Card(D, 10))
hand.append(Card(S, "Q"))

for card in hand:
    print(card.value, card.suit)