Longest word in a string

Question

How can I get the longest word in a string?

Eg.

$string = "Where did the big Elephant go?";

To return "Elephant"

Answer 1

Loop through the words of the string, keeping track of the longest word so far:

<?php
$string = "Where did the big Elephant go?";
$words  = explode(' ', $string);

$longestWordLength = 0;
$longestWord = '';

foreach ($words as $word) {
   if (strlen($word) > $longestWordLength) {
      $longestWordLength = strlen($word);
      $longestWord = $word;
   }
}

echo $longestWord;
// Outputs: "Elephant"
?>

Can be made a little more efficient, but you get the idea.

Answer 2

Update: Here is another even shorter way (and this one is definitely new ;)):

function reduce($v, $p) {
    return strlen($v) > strlen($p) ? $v : $p;
}

echo array_reduce(str_word_count($string, 1), 'reduce'); // prints Elephant

---

Similar as already posted but using str_word_count to extract the words (by just splitting at spaces, punctuation marks will be counted too):

$string = "Where did the big Elephant go?";

$words = str_word_count($string, 1);

function cmp($a, $b) {
    return strlen($b) - strlen($a);
}

usort($words, 'cmp');

print_r(array_shift($words)); // prints Elephant

Answer 3

How about this -- split on spaces, then sort by the string length, and grab the first:

<?php

$string = "Where did the big Elephant go?";

$words = explode(' ', $string);

usort($words, function($a, $b) {
    return strlen($b) - strlen($a);
});

$longest = $words[0];

echo $longest;

---

Edit If you want to exclude punctuation, for example: "Where went the big Elephant?", you could use preg_split:

$words = preg_split('/\b/', $string);

Answer 4

This is a quite useful function when dealing with text so it might be a good idea to create a PHP function for that purpose:

function longestWord($txt) {
    $words = preg_split('#[^a-z0-9áéíóúñç]#i', $txt, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
    usort($words, function($a, $b) { return strlen($b) - strlen($a); });
    return $words[0];
}
echo longestWord("Where did the big Elephant go?");
// prints Elephant

Test this function here: http://ideone.com/FsnkVW

Answer 5

Here is another solution:

$array = explode(" ",$string);
$result = "";
foreach($array as $candidate)
{
if(strlen($candidate) > strlen($result))
$result = $candidate
}
return $result;

Answer 6

A possible solution would be to split the sentence on a common separator, such as spaces, and then iterate over each word, and only keep a reference to the largest one.

Do note that this will find the first largest word.

<?php
function getLargestWord($str) {
  $strArr = explode(' ', $str); // Split the sentence into an word array
  $lrgWrd = ''; // initial value for comparison
  for ($i = 0; $i < count($strArr); $i++) {
    if (strlen($strArr[$i]) > strlen($lrgWrd)) { // Word is larger
      $lrgWrd = $strArr[$i]; // Update the reference
    }
  }
  return $lrgWrd;
}
// Example:
echo getLargestWord('Where did the big Elephant go?');
?>

Answer 7

$string ='Where did the big Elephant';
function longestWord($str) {
$str.=" ";
$ex ="";
$max ="";
for($i = 0; $i < strlen($str); $i++)
{
    if($str[$i]==" ")
    {
        if(strlen($ex) > strlen($max))
            $max = $ex; 
            $ex ="";
    }else
    {
        $ex.=$str[$i];             
    }
}
return $max;
}
echo longestWord($string);