Programming Assignment 2 (Poker Hands)

Write a program that reads and classifies poker hands. Each card in the hand will have both a suit (clubs, diamonds, hearts or spades) and a rank (two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, jack, queen, king, or ace). No jokers are allowed. We will assume aces are high. After reading a hand of five cards, the program should classify the hand into one of the following categories (listed in order from best to worst):

1. Straight flush (both straight and flush)
2. Four of a kind (four cards of the same rank)
3. Full house (a three-of-a-kind and a pair)
4. Flush (five cards of the same suit)
5. Straight (five cards with consecutive ranks)
6. Three of a kind (three cards of the same rank)
7. Two pairs
8. Pair (two cards of the same rank)
9. High card (any other hand)

If the hand falls in two or more categories, then the program should chose the best one. For input purposes, use the following single letter abbreviations (two letters would signify one card):

Ranks: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 t j q k a
Suits: c d h s

If the input hand contains invalid characters, you should flag this as an error. The input to the program should be in a file whose name is provided on command line, and should have one hand per line. The following is the content of one such input file (input.txt):

2s:5s:4s:3s:6s
8c:as:7c:ad:3h
as:4c:5h:ks:9s
8c:1s:7c:ax:3h
3c:4c:3d:6c:3s
3c:7d:5s:6h:4h

A sample run of the program on a Terminal is shown below:

$ python3 Poker.py input.txt 

2s:5s:4s:3s:6s Straight flush
8c:as:7c:ad:3h Pair
8c:1s:7c:ax:3h INVALID Hand!
as:4c:5h:ks:9s High card
3c:4c:3d:6c:3s Three of a kind
3c:7d:5s:6h:4h Straight

$

Some Notes:

1. To open and read data from a file, you can use the following code:

     fname = sys.argv[1]
     with open(fname) as f:
       data = f.read().splitlines()
     f.close()
   

2. Some useful functions to write:

   # takes as input, hand, and returns True if hand is "valid", 
   # and False otherwise
   def valid_input(hand):
   	pass
   
   # takes as input, hand, and returns a "dictionary" whose keys are
   # the ranks and the values are the number of cards in the hand for 
   # the given rank
   def process_ranks(hand):
   	pass
   
   # takes as input, hand, and returns a "dictionary" whose keys are
   # the suits and the values are the number of cards in the hand for 
   # the given suit
   def process_suits(hand):
   	pass
   
   # takes the ranks_dict for a particular hand as input and returns True 
   # if the hand contains a "straight"
   def check_straight(ranks_dict):
   	pass
   
   # takes the suits_dict for a particular hand as input and returns True 
   # if the hand contains a "flush"
   def check_flush(suits_dict):
   	pass
   
   # takes the ranks_dict for a particular hand as input and returns True 
   # if the hand contains a "fours"
   def check_fours(ranks_dict):
   	pass
   
   # takes the ranks_dict for a particular hand as input and returns True 
   # if the hand contains a "threes"
   def check_threes(ranks_dict):
   	pass
   
   # takes the ranks_dict for a particular hand as input and returns the 
   # number of "pairs".
   def check_pairs(ranks_dict):
   	pass
   
   # takes boolean inputs straight, flush, four, three, pair for a hand
   # and returns the highest hand classification.
   def hand_type(straight,flush,four,three,pair):
   	pass
   
   

What to Submit? Poker.py