How to remove duplicate playing cards from player's hand? - php

Question

I am trying to deal a hand of five cards to a player and score them. My scoring program seems to be working fine, but I am running into the issue of duplicate cards getting dealt from time to time. I tried using a while loop to check for duplicate cards, but this seems kind of hackish. My code is below. Please keep in mind that I am definitely a neophyte, so the simpler the solution the better! Thanks so much.
// create suits array
$suits = array("996", "997", "998", "999");
// create faces array
$faces = array();
$faces[1] = "1";
$faces[2] = "2";
$faces[3] = "3";
$faces[4] = "4";
$faces[5] = "5";
$faces[6] = "6";
$faces[7] = "7";
$faces[8] = "8";
$faces[9] = "9";
$faces[10] = "10";
$faces[11] = "11";
$faces[12] = "12";
$faces[13] = "13";
// create player's hand
$card = array();
for ($i = 0; $i < 5; $i++)
{
$face_value = shuffle($faces);
$suit_value = shuffle($suits);
$card[$i] = $faces[$face_value].$suits[$suit_value];
$counter = 0;
while ($counter < 100)
{
if (in_array($card[$i], $card))
{
$face_value = shuffle($faces);
$suit_value = shuffle($suits);
$card[$i] = $faces[$face_value].$suits[$suit_value];
}
$counter++;
}
print ("<img src=\"../images/4/$card[$i].gif\">");
}

Answer 1

It might be more efficient to simply set up an array that has 52 elements, one for each of the cards.
$cards = range(0,51);
shuffle($cards);
$hand = array();
for ($i = 0; $i < 5; $i++)
{
$hand[$i] = $cards[$i];
}
Note that you can extract the suit and rank of a card $i simply, by doing
$suit = $hand[$i] % 4;
$rank = $hand[$i] / 4;
This will prevent duplicates.
EDIT: Suit and rank were reversed. They should be correct now.

Answer 2

Because you said you like it easy, you could create your arrays with range().
To avoid getting duplicate hands, check the $card array with before assigning the new hand.
the new code would look like:
// create suits array
$suits = range(996, 999);
// create faces array
$faces = range(0, 13);
// create player's hand
$card = array();
while ( count($card) < 5 )
{
$face_value = shuffle($faces);
$suit_value = shuffle($suits);
$newcard = $faces[$face_value].$suits[$suit_value];
if ( in_array($card, $newcard) ) {
$card[] = $newcard;
print ("<img src=\"../images/4/$newcard.gif\">");
}
}

Answer 3

I would definitely create a deck with all 52 cards in it like so:
// create suits array
$suits = range(996, 999);
// create entire deck
$deck = range(0, 51);
shuffle($deck);
// create player's hand
for ($i = 0; $i < 5; $i++) {
$suit_value = $suits[$deck[$i] % 4];
$face_value = floor($deck[$i] / 4) + 1;
print ("<img src=\"../images/4/{$face_value}{$suit_value}.gif\">");
}