CardDealer is your go-to gem for creating, shuffling, and dealing decks of cards with ease. Whether you're building a poker night app or a virtual bridge club, CardDealer has got you covered. Enjoy customizable deck options, smooth shuffling algorithms, and simple yet powerful deck manipulation tools that bring the classic card game experience to life.

Install the gem and add to the application's Gemfile by executing:

$ bundle add card_dealer

If bundler is not being used to manage dependencies, install the gem by executing:

$ gem install card_dealer

To create a standard 52-card deck, use the CardDealer::BuildDeck.standard52 method:

deck = CardDealer::BuildDeck.standard52
puts deck.cards

To create a standard 36-card deck, use the CardDealer::BuildDeck.standard36 method:

deck = CardDealer::BuildDeck.standard36
puts deck.cards

To create a custom deck of cards, use the CardDealer::BuildDeck.custom method. You can specify the number of decks, cards per suit, ranks, and suits:

deck = CardDealer::BuildDeck.custom(
  decks: 2,
  cards_per_suit: 5,
  ranks: :highest,
  suits: %w[c d]
)
puts deck.cards

The CardDealer::Deck class provides methods for shuffling and dealing cards:

deck = CardDealer::BuildDeck.standard52
deck.shuffle
hand = deck.deal(5)
puts hand

You can also burn cards before dealing:

deck = CardDealer::BuildDeck.standard52
deck.shuffle
hand = deck.deal(3, burn: 1)
puts hand

To burn cards without dealing, just pass 0 as the number of cards to deal:

deck = CardDealer::BuildDeck.standard52
deck.shuffle
hand = deck.deal(0, burn: 1)
puts hand

Burned cards are stored within the deck and can be accessed via burned_cards method:

deck = CardDealer::BuildDeck.standard52
deck.shuffle
deck.deal(0, burn: 10)
puts deck.burned_cards

To encode a deck of cards as a binary string, use the CardDealer::BinaryDeck.encode method. This is useful if you'd like to store a deck of cards in a database, cache, or a file:

deck = CardDealer::BuildDeck.standard52
encoded_deck = CardDealer::BinaryDeck.encode(deck)
# - or -
encoded_deck = deck.to_binary_s
puts encoded_deck

To decode a binary string into a deck of cards, use the CardDealer::BinaryDeck.decode method:

encoded_deck = "\x02\xCDP" # binary string
decoded_deck = CardDealer::BinaryDeck.decode(encoded_deck)
# - or -
decoded_deck = CardDealer::Deck.from_binary(encoded_deck)
puts decoded_deck.cards

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/svyatov/card_dealer.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.