Know that nobody will be embarassed here by a show of genuine effort and will to learn.

Just show us what you have tried so far. The Monks will take it from there.

To get you on your way, try first to build the array with the deck.

Just follow the steps 'b' and 'c' quite literally. The array with the cards should finally contain entries like "Ace of Hearts", "10 of Spades", ...

You can build these entries as follows::

$card = "$type of $suit";
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I am not going to submit what I have done so far as I do not want to embarass myself :P

If you have never seen nested foreach loops, the docs show an example: Foreach Loops

for each color in hearts, spades, clubs, diamonds, do
   for each figure in ace, king, queen, jack, 10 ....
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I described and showed an implementation of a card dealing algorithm in Re: Random data generation.. There is no nesting, so it may not be what you want, since I don't know why you need to nest.

Regards,

John Davies

The basic operations for dealing with arrays are: push, pop, shift, unshift and splice. Review how each one of these work. Also you can access each element in the array individually by using an index. $deck [ 0 ] is the first card.

You will have to pick a card at random from the deck. Read about the rand() function rand() function. The deck has the scalar value of "@deck" number of cards in it. The indicies of all the cards are [ 0..@deck-1]. Note this range starts at zero not one!

Once you can pick a card at random from the deck and print it, you have to figure out how you will satisfy the requirement that you can't have duplicates. I mean there is only one "2 of clubs" so you have to figure out a way to prevent it being picked twice. suggestion: think about what splice does.

Have fun and let us know how it goes! Everybody here was a beginner once.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my @deck;

foreach my $suit qw(clubs diamonds hearts spades)
{
   #print "Working on the $suit\n";  # un-comment to watch looping
   
   foreach my $card_type (2..10,'ace','king','queen','jack')
   {
      #print "     Now card=$card_type\n";  # un-comment to watch loop
      
      push @deck, "$card_type of $suit";        
   }
}

print "There are ".@deck." cards in the deck\n";
foreach my $card (@deck)
{
   print "$card\n";
}


__END__
Output....uncomment the 2 print statements in the nested loop
          to see exactly how the looping is done...
There are 52 cards in the deck
2 of clubs
3 of clubs
4 of clubs
... etc. then diamonds, then hearts, spades...
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Hey guys thanks for your help, after many hours of toil, I seem to have worked it out. I did all this BEFORE reading Marshall's reply. Feeling quite happy with myself for finally getting it to work :). Could I have some opinions on the way I went about it? Should I have done anything differently/more efficiently?

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

OUTER: @suit=('spades', 'hearts', 'clubs', 'diamonds');
foreach  $suit(@suit) {
  INNER:  @types=( "ace","2","3","4","5","6","7","8","9","10","jack","
+queen","king");
  foreach $types(@types) {
    $card="$types of $suit";
    print "$card\n";
    $cardcounter++;
    push(@cards,$card,);
    }

}
print "\n"x2;
print "$cardcounter cards have been created\n";
print "\n"x2;

ATTEMPT:
for ($counter=1;$counter<11;) {
$i = int(rand(@cards)) ;
push (@alreadyused,@cards[$i]);
$count=grep (/@cards[$i]/i,@alreadyused);

if ($count<2) {
  print "Random card is: @cards[$i]\n";
  $counter++;
  push (@iterations,@cards[$i]);
}
else {next ATTEMPT;}
}

print "\n"x2;
$number=@iterations;
print "$number random cards have been chosen, with no duplicates";
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• Fix these warnings:

  Scalar value @cards[$i] better written as $cards[$i] at
  [download]

• Add use strict; then declare all variables with my. See use strict and warnings.
• Perl has a convenient quoting operator which is handy for constructing lists: qw. It saves you from excessive quotes and commas. Range Operators are nice too:

      foreach $types ( qw(ace jack queen king), (2 .. 10) ) {
  [download]

• perltidy is useful for indenting code.