The longest word

[NiklasRTZ]

On Jul 28, 5:02 am, Bearophile <bearophileH... at lycos.com> wrote:
> On Jul 28, 10:26 am, NiklasRTZ <nikla... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Newbie hello onwards to the .py manual asks meantime how the longest
> > word gets determined?
> > First word, ok
> >  'a aa aaa aa'[:'a aa aaa aa'.find(' ',1,10)]
>
> Your language is not easy to understand, but I think you want to find
> the longest word in a string.
> If this is the input string:
> txt = "a aa aaa aa"
>
> There are several ways to do it, I'll show a simple one.
>
> You can split it into its parts (not having Python a built-in lazy
> split yet, you can split it all at once). You can do it with the
> string split method. It produces a list of the words, more or less
> (but you may have words like "gone,", you may have to take care of
> them too, this requires some code.
>
> Once you have a list of words, you have to take the longest. A simple
> way is to replace each word with a tuple that contains the length of
> the word and the word itself, then pick the tuple with the highest
> length value. But Python allows you to do such operation in a faster
> way: you can use the max() function, it has a "key" function that
> allows you to remap on the fly what you mean by "max". So you just
> have to give it a function (reference) that given the word spits its
> length, such function is "len" itself.
>
> If you instead want to find the position of the longest word the
> program gets a little longer. Ask if you need something different.
>
> Bye,
> bearophile

Thank you. This seems to work:
sorted("a AAA aa aaaaa  sdfsdfsdfsdf vv".split(' '),lambda a,b: len(a)-
len(b))[-1]
'sdfsdfsdfsdf'