Question

I’m making a Yahtzee game and I need a way to calculate a small straight (a sequence of 4 numbers in order). So valid ones would be: 1,2,3,4 | 2,3,4,5 | 3,4,5,6.

I have an array of 5 numbers and I need to figure out if one of those 3 combinations is in that array.

For those not familiar with Yahtzee, there are 5 dice (the five numbers in the array) that can be from 1-6.

Answer 1

function isStraight($hand) {
    $straights = array(range(1, 4), range(2, 5), range(3, 6));
    foreach($straights as $solution) {
        if(array_intersect($solution, $hand) == $solution) {
            return $solution;
        }
    }
    return false;
}

$hand = array(1,5,2,4,3);

var_dump(isStraight($hand));

Not sure about the rules of the game, but that should do it.

The function is going to return the first solution it finds – in this case [1,2,3,4]. It is going to return the boolean false if it doesn’t find any straights in the hand. Hope this helps.