standard_card

A Lightweight Library for Efficient Card Representation

5 stable releases

1.4.0 Jun 18, 2024
1.3.0 Apr 12, 2024
1.2.0 Apr 11, 2024
1.1.0 Apr 11, 2024
1.0.0 Apr 10, 2024

MIT license

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A Lightweight Library for Efficient Card Representation

The StandardCard library provides a programmer-friendly way to represent a standard deck of 52 cards.

It prioritizes both fast access to card information and minimal storage footprint, making it ideal for various game development or card manipulation tasks.

Card definition

A card is an integer is made up of four bytes. The high-order bytes are used to hold the rank bit pattern, whereas the low-order bytes hold the suit/rank/prime value of the card.

xxxAKQJT 98765432 cdhsrrrr sspppppp
xxxbbbbb bbbbbbbb cdhsrrrr sspppppp

Where

Key Definition
p Prime number of rank
s Suit of card (clubs=00, diamonds=01, hearts=10, spades=11)
r Rank of card
cdhs bit turned on depending on suit of card (spades=0001,...,clubs=1000)
b bit turned on depending on rank of card

As an example, the Five of Hearts (5h) would be represented as

xxxAKQJT 98765432 cdhsrrrr sspppppp
00000000 00001000 00100011 01000111 = 0x00082347 = 533319

More information about the card is presented in a table below

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 J Q K A
Ranks 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Primes 2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 31 37 41

The 52-card deck

Building on the previous card definition, let's look at the value table for a standard 52-card deck

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 J Q K A
Clubs 98306 164099 295429 557831 1082379 2131213 4228625 8423187 16812055 33589533 67144223 134253349 268471337
Diamonds 81986 147779 279109 541511 1066059 2114893 4212305 8406867 16795735 33573213 67127903 134237029 268455017
Hearts 73858 139651 270981 533383 1057931 2106765 4204177 8398739 16787607 33565085 67119775 134228901 268446889
Spades 69826 135619 266949 529351 1053899 2102733 4200145 8394707 16783575 33561053 67115743 134224869 268442857

Benefits

  • Minimal Memory Usage: data structures can represent all card information with a single identifier.

  • Faster Lookups: Retrieving card information becomes a constant-time operation due to the use of bit-wise operator.

No runtime deps