Poker hand evaluator for Ruby

Author

Robert Olson (rko618 [at] gmail [dot] com)

License

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the BSD license. See LICENSE for more details.

Download

The latest version of ruby poker can be found at

rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=5257

The homepage of this project is located at

rubyforge.org/projects/rubypoker

Description

Ruby-Poker handles the logic for getting the rank of a poker hand. It can also be used to compare two or more hands to determine which hand has the highest poker value.

Card representations can be passed to the PokerHand constructor as a string or an array. Face cards (cards ten, jack, queen, king, and ace) are created using their letter representation (T, J, Q, K, A).

Examples

In this section some examples show what can be done with this class.

hand1 = PokerHand.new("8H 9C TC JD QH")
hand2 = PokerHand.new(["3D", "3C", "3S", "KD", "AH"])
puts hand1                => 8h 9c Tc Jd Qh (Straight)
puts hand1.just_cards     => 8h 9c Tc Jd Qh
puts hand1.rank           => Straight
puts hand2                => 3d 3c 3s Kd Ah (Three of a kind)
puts hand2.rank           => Three of a kind
puts hand1 > hand2        => true

Duplicates

By default ruby-poker will not raise an exception if you add the same card to a hand twice. You can tell ruby-poker to not allow duplicates by doing the following

PokerHand.allow_duplicates = false

Place that line near the beginning of your program. The change is program wide so once allow_duplicates is set to false, all poker hands will raise an exception if a duplicate card is added to the hand.

Compatibility

Ruby-Poker is compatible with Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9.

Background

The original version of ruby-poker was written entirely by myself (Robert Olson). As of the 0.2.0 release ruby-poker incorporates Patrick Hurley’s Texas Holdem code from rubyquiz.com/quiz24.html which I merged into ruby-poker.