Recommended textual representation for playing cards?

Question

I am working on creating a king-of-the-hill that involves using playing cards, but I am not sure what the best way to represent them textually is.

Here are some alternatives I have considered:

Note, the samples show a hand consisting of the Ace of Clubs, Ten of Clubs, Five of Hearts, Five of Spades, and Queen of Spades.

• Represent rank with digits 1-9 and 10, and then J, Q, and K, and suit with S (spades), C (clubs), D (diamonds), and H (hearts):

  1C 10C 5H 5S QS
  

• Use 0 to represent a ten:

  1C 0C 5H 5S QS
  

  • Each card is represented by the same number of characters.
  • Somewhat less readable.

• Use numbers to represent all ranks:

  1C 10C 5H 5S 12S
  

  • Might be easier to parse, somehow.

• Use ♠. ♣, ♦, and ♥ to represent suit:

  1♣ 10♣ 5♥ 5♠ Q♠
  

  • Much easier to read.
  • Might be more difficult for languages that have problems with extended charsets.

• Use A instead of 1, for an ace:

  A♣ 10♣ 5♥ 5♠ Q♠
  

  • Makes it a little bit prettier.

• Some combination of these alternatives.

• Use a custom character set to encode the cards.

  • Much more efficient.
  • Can't view it very easily.

I am rather partial to formatting them like A♣ 10♣ 5♥ 5♠ Q♠, but I would like to see what others think about this issue.

Answer 1

KISS. Sticking to ASCII makes it simpler: the byte representations will be the same in ISO-8859-1, UTF-8, and MacRoman, so people don't have to worry about ensuring that they're using the correct character encoding. (Of course, they should as a matter of principle, but this site isn't really about best practices).

Of the various ASCII options, the one I'm more familiar with from my bridge-playing days is A23456789TJQK CDHS, but the simplest for inter-program communication is probably to number the cards from 0 to 51.

However, there's nothing which requires you to use the same format for inter-program communication and for presentation to the user. Although I recommend using ASCII for the king-of-the-hill communication, the scoring program could be made more polished by using A23456789TJQK ♠♡♢♣ in its logs.

Answer 2

Might I suggest Unicode (6+)?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_cards_in_Unicode

🂡 🂱 🃁 🃑
🂢 🂲 🃂 🃒
🂣 🂳 🃃 🃓
🂤 🂴 🃄 🃔
🂥 🂵 🃅 🃕
🂦 🂶 🃆 🃖
🂧 🂷 🃇 🃗
🂨 🂸 🃈 🃘
🂩 🂹 🃉 🃙
🂪 🂺 🃊 🃚
🂫 🂻 🃋 🃛
🂬 🂼 🃌 🃜
🂭 🂽 🃍 🃝
🂮 🂾 🃎 🃞
🂠 🃏 🃟

edit This is a screenshot from Chromium on Ubuntu 14.04 of what it should look like.