Highest Card From Deck | Dataford Interview Questions

Given a list of playing cards as strings in the format "Rank-Suit" (e.g. "3-H"), find the highest card; rank precedence 2<...<10<J<Q<K<A, suit precedence H<D<C<S on ties.

Asked in the Onsite coding round stage. The problem was printed, solved on the candidate's own laptop, and evaluated by an invigilator.

Implement highest_card(cards). The input is a non-empty list of card strings, and the output is the original string representing the highest card. If multiple identical cards occur, return that card string.

Constraints

1 <= len(cards) <= 10^5
Each card is formatted as "Rank-Suit"
Ranks are one of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q, K, A
Suits are one of H, D, C, S
All input cards follow the specified format

Function Signature

def highest_card(cards):

Whenever you're ready, walk me through your approach or go straight to the code. The requirements are in the Question tab.

Problem

Given a list of playing cards as strings in the format "Rank-Suit" (e.g. "3-H"), find the highest card; rank precedence 2<...<10<J<Q<K<A, suit precedence H<D<C<S on ties.

Asked in the Onsite coding round stage. The problem was printed, solved on the candidate's own laptop, and evaluated by an invigilator.

Constraints

1 <= len(cards) <= 10^5
Each card is formatted as "Rank-Suit"
Ranks are one of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q, K, A
Suits are one of H, D, C, S
All input cards follow the specified format

Function Signature

def highest_card(cards):

Whenever you're ready, walk me through your approach or go straight to the code. The requirements are in the Question tab.