Question

after the for loop arrays gets the values from tmp1. How can i store values for later use?

def getCardRank(self, arrays, straight = False):
  print arrays

  tmp1 = arrays[:]  
  tmp2 = {i: arrays[i] for i in range(0, len(arrays))}

  print tmp1

  for array in tmp1:
    for card in array:
      i = array.index(card)
      mod = card % 13

      if (mod == 0 and False != straight):
        card = 0 if sum(array) == 27 else 13
      else:
        card = 13 if mod == 0 else mod
        array[i] = card

  print tmp1
  print tmp2

that gives me:

[[44, 43, 42, 41, 40], [37, 36, 35, 34, 33], [17, 16, 15, 14, 26]]

[[44, 43, 42, 41, 40], [37, 36, 35, 34, 33], [17, 16, 15, 14, 26]]

{0: [44, 43, 42, 41, 40], 1: [37, 36, 35, 34, 33], 2: [17, 16, 15, 14, 26]}

[[5, 4, 3, 2, 1], [11, 10, 9, 8, 7], [4, 3, 2, 1, 13]]

{0: [5, 4, 3, 2, 1], 1: [11, 10, 9, 8, 7], 2: [4, 3, 2, 1, 13]}

Answer 1

I’m a little unclear on the question, but I’ll assume that you want print(tmp1) to always print [44, 43, 42]...etc instead of [5, 4, 3].

The problem with the assignment tmp1 = arrays[:] is that if you create a copy of a list to iterate over using slice notation, the original list is changed.

In order to store the original array in tmp1, a rather inefficient solution would be to create a tuple tmp1 and iterate over arrays appending each element to tmp1. Another would be, as previously suggested, to pickle your data structures.

However, it looks like the real solution is to change how you’re thinking about storing tmp1 – consider that if you need to retain the original arrays after calling getCardRank, you probably want to think of it as part of the object that self refers to in the function’s signature. Therefore, you should store the original copy of arrays in a member variable (self.foo = [array for array in arrays]).

As a side note, it makes your code somewhat more difficult to read when you use inline conditionals.