# Determine the height of a Tetris game's board after a sequence of moves

I have written a program that will determine the height of a Tetris board after a sequence of moves are made. These inputs are in the form of a comma-delimited list, and look like <piece><position>. List of pieces:

• I - this is a 1x4 piece lying on its side
• Q - this is a 2x2 square piece
• T - this is a T-shaped piece
• Z - this is a left-facing 2x2 offset
• S - this is a right-facing 2x2 offset
• L - this is a right-facing L
• J - this is a left-facing L

Image (source) of the pieces. Pieces are always in the same orientation as below.

I've diagrammed them out below as well. Rotation is not in scope for this problem (e.g. a vertical I is out of scope).

I - xxxx
Q - xx
xx
T - xxx
x
Z - xx
xx
S -  xx
xx
L - x
x
xx
J -  x
x
xx


Positions are 0-indexed, and represent a location from the left side of the board (the board is 10-wide).

Example 1:

Input: I0,Q4

Output: 2

Board:

bbbbQQbbbb
IIIIQQbbbb


(b represents a blank space, and the blank lines above this are left out)

Example 2

Input: Q0,Q2,Q4,Q6,Q8

Output: 0

Board (intentionally left blank):

Explanation: Using normal Tetris rules, a row is removed whenever every block in a row is filled. This sequence would place 5 square cubes evenly spaced along the bottom, which then removes those two rows.

class Tetris:
def __init__(self):
self.board =[]
self.pieces = {
'I' : [[1,1,1,1]],

'Q' : [[1,1],
[1,1]],

'T': [[1,1,1],
[0,1,0]],

'Z':[[1,1,0],
[0,1,1]],

'S':[[0,1,1],
[1,1,0]],

'L':[[1,0],
[1,0],
[1,1]],

'J':[[0,1],
[0,1],
[1,1]]}

def newRow(self):
return [0 for _ in range(10)]

def doesThePieceFit(self,row,pieceName,pos):
#checks to see if a piece fits on the row at given position
#check bottom to the top
piece = self.pieces[pieceName]
for i in range(len(piece)):
pieceRow = piece[-1*(1+i)]
if i+row == len(self.board): return True
boardRow = self.board[i+row]
for j in range(len(pieceRow)):
if pieceRow[j] and boardRow[pos+j]: return False
return True

def removeFullRows(self,startRow,numRows):
#removes full rows from the board
#only checks rows between startRow and startRow+numRows
fullRows = [i+startRow
for i in range(numRows)
if all(self.board[i+startRow])]
for fullRow  in sorted(fullRows,reverse=True):
del self.board[fullRow]

piece = self.pieces[pieceName]
for i in range(len(piece)):
pieceRow = piece[-1*(1+i)]
if i+row == len(self.board):
self.board+=self.newRow(),
boardRow = self.board[i+row]
for j in range(len(pieceRow)):
if pieceRow[j]:
boardRow[pos+j] = pieceRow[j]
self.removeFullRows(row,len(piece))

#1.find the first row where piece is blocked
#2.Add the piece at the row above it
blockedByRow = None
for row in range(len(self.board)-1,-1,-1):
if not self.doesThePieceFit(row,pieceName,pos):
blockedByRow = row
break

targetRow = 0 if  blockedByRow == None else blockedByRow+1

for piece in pieces.split(','):
return len(self.board)

• This is a very good question, well detailed, interesting and even with images! You will become a great contributor of this site :) – Caridorc Jul 22 '20 at 19:15
• Your second example board is empty? – Reinderien Jul 22 '20 at 19:18
• @Reinderien yes - because all rows have been cleared – Dannnno Jul 22 '20 at 22:01
• @Caridorc thank you. The credit goes to @ Dannno :D – meowlicious Jul 23 '20 at 1:23

The first thing I did was use Black to reformat the code - yours is pretty good, but there are some minor style complaints I had (generally around the lack of whitespace in a few places). Additionally, PEP8 defines the naming conventions in python - generally, prefer_this notThis.

Lastly, all of your methods should have docstrings. I haven't added this b/c it isn't as pertinent to the code review, but it is good practice in general.

From there, I thought about your actual approach. At a high level you:

• Create a new instance of the object
• Pass it a string, parse the string, and process each token
• Attempt to fit pieces
• Clear full rows

None of that is inherently bad, but I think it can be tightened up a bit.

## User Input

Right now you don't have any validation of the user inputs - we're being very trusting that the values that are provided will be usable. We probably want to do this validation

Additionally, I don't think that the Tetris class should be responsible for handling the comma-delimited string - it should just take a piece and a position, and something else should be responsible for taking the input and translating it into arguments. If you're feeling friendly, a @classmethod might be appropriate. Lastly, I think this class method should return the board, not the height, so I added a new height property to the class. I ended up with something like this:

pieces = {
"I": ((True, True, True, True)),
"Q": ((True, True), (True, True)),
"T": ((True, True, True), (False, True, False)),
"Z": ((True, True, False), (False, True, True)),
"S": ((False, True, True), (True, True, False)),
"L": ((True, False), (True, False), (True, True)),
"J": ((False, True), (False, True), (True, True)),
}

@classmethod
board = Tetris()
for piece in user_input.split(","):
if len(piece) > 2:
raise ValueError(f"Piece {piece} is malformed")
piece_id = piece[0]
drop_position = piece[1]
if not Tetris.is_valid_piece(piece_id):
raise ValueError(f"Piece {piece_id} is not a valid Tetris piece")
if not Tetris.is_valid_drop_location(drop_position):
raise IndexError(
f"Drop location {drop_position} is not a valid board location"
)
return board

@classmethod
def is_valid_piece(cls, piece_id):
return piece_id in cls.pieces

@classmethod
def is_valid_drop_location(drop_position):
try:
int(drop_position)
except ValueError:
return False

return drop_position >= 0 and drop_position < 10

@property
def height(self):
return self.board.length



You'll also notice that I moved Tetris.pieces into a class attribute instead of an instance attribute - this is because it should be the same everywhere. I also changed 0/1 to True/False because it is a binary value (I think an enum is probably best to be explicit, e.g. boardState.FULL and boardState.EMPTY). Lastly, I changed from nested lists to nested tuples - this is because tuples are immutable, and you never need to change the shape definition.

## OOP

I wonder if it is worthwhile making a separate class to represent the pieces, and then you can do something like TetrisPiece.fitsAtLocation(board, location). I haven't fully thought about what this would look like or if it is actually better, but it might be a nice way to encapsulate that functionality.

This would also be a convenient way to extend this to handle rotations as well, as you would just do TetrisPiece.rotate(Direction.LEFT) and handle it all under the hood.

If you want to extend this to a full game, then instead of just having a "drop position" you also need a relative location on the board, handling T-spins, etc. The more complicated this gets, the more I think a separate class is going to improve readability.

## General nitpicks

• doesThePieceFit seems really weird - I get how it works, but you should definitely introduce some constants to replace the magic method, and maybe consider if there is a better way to model the data.
• In particular, perhaps we should store the block state for a different shape in reverse order (e.g. bottom-to-top instead of top-to-bottom)?
• removeFullRows creates a list, then sorts it - I think you can probably come up with a different approach for this
• addPieceAt has the same magic as doesThePieceFit - is there a way that we can either combine their functionality, or use a common helper method?
• addPiece I think you can use for-else to handle this a bit more elegantly than using the ternary, but my mood on the for-else swings every time I use it

Your code is good but it is not intuitive to interface with grafically.

I can print the board but it comes out reversed and as zeros and ones and I got to do:

>>> t = Tetris()
>>> print(t.board)


But you can use the special method repr to make it print nicely automagically (whenever the user asks print(t))

In Python 3 you can just add this at the end of your class:

class Tetris:
# other code

def __repr__(self):
return '\n'.join(reversed([''.join("■" if elem else '□' for elem in line) for line in t.board]))


And now you have an intuitive and graphically nice pretty print:

t = Tetris()
for piece, pos in ( ('L',1), ('Z', 2), ('S', 3), ('I',5)):
print(t)
print("\n"*5)


Outputs:

□■□□□□□□□□
□■□□□□□□□□
□■■□□□□□□□

□■□□□□□□□□
□■■■□□□□□□
□■■■■□□□□□

□□□□■■□□□□
□■□■■□□□□□
□■■■□□□□□□
□■■■■□□□□□

□□□□□■■■■□
□□□□■■□□□□
□■□■■□□□□□
□■■■□□□□□□
□■■■■□□□□□


In Python 2 you might have to use ASCII characters but this allows for easy developing and testing and is necessary in case you want to turn this into a game.

(It looks way nicer in Python IDLE than in this site).

1. Use Booleans instead of Integers: The code uses integers to check if a cell is occupied or not. Example: Replace I = [1,1,1,1] with I=[True,True,True,True]

2. Mark internal functions with underscores: By python convention, any function that is not meant to be invoked from outside the class is usually marked with underscores. Example: Replace def addPiece(...) with def _addPiece_(...).

3. Use meaningful variable names: Use meaningful names for variables (including iterator variables) Don't use arbitrary names like i or j. Looking at the variable names, it isn't clear whether doesThePieceFit validates columns at all

4. Handling invalid input: You can return an error value (throw a python error or return integer value -1) for invalid inputs. (Such as I9 on a size 10 board)

Also, if you can change the input format, you can make some minor changes to make this code more useful. You can change the constructor to __init__(self,size) instead of fixing the size to 10. Also, you can change the input format from string "Q0,Q2" to list [["Q",0],["Q",2]]

• You should not use the __dunder__ method to mark "internal" functions. If you want, you can use _one_under to mark internal, and __two_under if you need name mangling too (you almost never need name mangling) – Dannnno Jul 22 '20 at 18:46
• @Dannnno fixed it – Abhay Aravinda Jul 22 '20 at 18:49