random deck-card selection

[Sofia29]

I'm writing a card game and I'm having trouble getting the first part of it right, which is picking out a random card from the deck and displaying it to screen. So it's supposed to display a different card every time i run the function in the program. The problem is, I keep getting the same output every time "Nine of Hearts".

This is what I have so far,

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

//declare two string arrays
//one holds the "suit" of the cards, the other hold the "value"
string suit[] = {"Diamonds", "Hearts", "Spades", "Clubs"};
string faceValue[] = {"Two", "Three", "Four", "Five", "Six", "Seven", "Eight", "Nine", "Ace", "King", "Queen", "Jack"};

//a function that randomly determines the suit and value of a card
string getCard()
{
    string card;   //a string that represents a card
 
//declare two integer variables that create random values

    int cardValue = rand() % 12;  //creates values between 0 and 11, for randomly determining the face value of a card

    int cardSuite = rand() % 4;  //creates values between 0 and 3, for determining the suit of a card
    
    card += faceValue[cardValue]; //Add the face value to the string "card"
    
    card += " of "; //a divider in-between the card value and suit 
    
    card += suit[cardSuite]; //Add the suit of the card to the string
    
    return card;  //output the string
}

int main()
{
   //output the randomly picked card to screen
    cout << getCard() << endl;
    return 0;
}

this is the output I keep getting every time I run the program:

Nine of Hearts

this "random selection" function I'm trying to do is meant to work as a means of shuffling the cards in the beginning of every round in the game and displaying only the top card from the deck.

any help is appreciated, Thanks!

[TheIdeasMan]

Hi Sofia29,

You probably need to seed the random generator, as per this example :

http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cstdlib/rand/

Hope all goes well :+)