PyDealer: Playing Card Package

PyDealer is a simple to use Python package for "simulating" decks of standard playing cards (also known as a French Deck). PyDealer let's you easily create Deck instances, each containing a full 52 card deck of playing cards. Each card is a separate Card instance, with a name, value, suit, and abbreviation. There is also the Stack class, which is useful for creating hands, or discard piles, etc. It is the backbone of the PyDealer package, and actually the Deck class is just a subclass of the Stack class.

PyDealer could possibly be used as part of a CLI (command line interface) card-based game, or even a graphical game as well, I suppose. It may also be of interest to beginner Python programmers, since it's a relatively simple package, which I created as a way to learn Python, packaging, testing, documentation (Sphinx), etc. I even ended up learning how to use Git a bit, which I must say was slightly frustrating at first. This package has taught me a lot, and maybe someone else can benefit from it as well. Or maybe not. Either way, here it is.

The PyDealer package can be found at the Python Package Index, and should be downloaded from there, and, ideally, installed with pip.

Note to Developers

If you want to work on this project, please make sure you are working on the latest version of the dev branch, and make your pull requests to that branch. Thanks.

Documentation

Full documentation for PyDealer can be found on readthedocs.org:

http://pydealer.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Quick Usage Example

Here is a quick example, using IDLE, demonstrating how to construct a new Deck instance, representing a full French Deck of cards, as well as how to shuffle the deck, and deal some cards (7 of them) from it, to a hand. Then we'll print a listing of the contents of the hand, in a human readable way, with a simple print statement.

>>> import pydealer
>>> deck = pydealer.Deck()
>>> deck.shuffle()
>>> hand = deck.deal(7)
>>> hand.sort()
>>> print hand
2 of Diamonds
5 of Hearts
9 of Hearts
9 of Spades
Jack of Spades
King of Clubs
Ace of Clubs

Install/Update/Uninstall with pip

I recommend downloading and installing pip, if you haven't already, and using that to install PyDealer, from the Python Package Index.

Enter one of the following commands into your *nix Bash or Windows Command Prompt (after installing pip).

Install

$ pip install pydealer

Update

$ pip install pydealer -U

Uninstall

$ pip uninstall pydealer

Relevant Links

Standard 52-card deck Wikipedia Article

Playing card Wikipedia Article