Generating all 5 card poker hands

Question

This problem sounds simple at first glance, but turns out to be a lot more complicated than it seems. It\'s got me stumped for the moment.

There are 52c5 = 2,598,960

Answer 1

You could simply give all hands a canonical ordering of values (A to K), then assign abstract suit letters according to their order of first appearance in that order.

Example: JH 4C QD 9C 3D would convert to 3a 4b 9b Jc Qa.

Generation should work best as dynamic programming:

• start with a set of a single hand that is empty,
• make a new set:
  • for each hand in the old set, generate each possible hand by adding one of the remaining cards
  • canonicalize all new hands
  • remove duplicates