Question

I am attempting to generate a potential card ‘plays’ list from a predetermined hand of straights (in this game a straight is defined as 3+ cards – e.g. [3,4,5]). The difficlty lies in finding a way to take a list of identified straights (which may include multiple unconnected straights – ['2D','3D','4D','5D','6D','8D','9D','10D']) and appending them and their sub-straights contained within them to a plays list(for the given hand the output would ideally be [['2D','3D','4D'],['3D','4D','5D'],['4D','5D','6D'],['2D','3D','4D','5D'],['3D','4D','5D','6D'],['8D','9D','10D']])

Below is the current attempt being made;

seq = ['1D','2D','3D','4D', '6D', '7D','8D', '10D', '11D', '12D']
plays = []
for card in seq:
    ind = seq.index(card)+1
    try:
        if int(seq[ind][0:len(seq[ind])-1]) - int(card[0:len(card)-1]) == 2:
            for num in xrange(len(seq[0:ind])):
                if len(seq[0:(ind-num)]) > 3:
                    plays.append(seq[0:(ind-num)])
                    plays.append(seq[num+1:ind])
                elif len(seq[0:(ind-num)]) == 3:
                    plays.append(seq[0:(ind-num)])
            print plays #debug
except IndexError:
    print 'error'
    #append from the last appended chunk up until last element?
    #arises from final element

[[‘1D’, ‘2D’, ‘3D’, ‘4D’], [‘2D’, ‘3D’, ‘4D’], [‘1D’, ‘2D’, ‘3D’]]

[[‘1D’, ‘2D’, ‘3D’, ‘4D’], [‘2D’, ‘3D’, ‘4D’], [‘1D’, ‘2D’, ‘3D’], [‘1D’, ‘2D’, ‘3D’, ‘4D’, ‘6D’, ‘7D’, ‘8D’], [‘2D’, ‘3D’, ‘4D’, ‘6D’, ‘7D’, ‘8D’], [‘1D’, ‘2D’, ‘3D’, ‘4D’, ‘6D’, ‘7D’], [‘3D’, ‘4D’, ‘6D’, ‘7D’, ‘8D’], [‘1D’, ‘2D’, ‘3D’, ‘4D’, ‘6D’], [‘4D’, ‘6D’, ‘7D’, ‘8D’]**, [‘1D’, ‘2D’, ‘3D’, ‘4D‘], [‘6D’, ‘7D’, ‘8D’], [‘1D’, ‘2D’, ‘3D’]]

error

The ouput in bold indicates unwanted elements (duplicates or conjunction of separate straights).
Thanks for the input!

edit 1: added lines 10-12

edit 2: added solution provided by @Steve Tjoa

(Given that cards is a series of ints)
cards = [1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12]

def f(cards):
    for i in range(len(cards)):
        for j in range(i+3, len(cards)+1):
            if cards[i:j] == range(cards[i], cards[i]+j-i):
                plays.append(cards[i:j])
            print plays

Answer 1

Does this help?

In [34]: def f(cards):
   ....:     return [cards[i:j]
   ....:             for i in range(len(cards))
   ....:             for j in range(i+3, len(cards)+1)
   ....:             if cards[i:j] == range(cards[i], cards[i]+j-i)]
   ....: 

In [35]: f([1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12])
Out[35]: [[1, 2, 3], [1, 2, 3, 4], [2, 3, 4], [6, 7, 8], [10, 11, 12]]

In [36]: f([2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10])
Out[36]: 
[[2, 3, 4],
 [2, 3, 4, 5],
 [2, 3, 4, 5, 6],
 [3, 4, 5],
 [3, 4, 5, 6],
 [4, 5, 6],
 [8, 9, 10]]

Reasoning: cards[i] is the first card of the straight; cards[j-1] is the last card. range returns consecutive integers. j-i is the length of the straight.