How Can I Extract the stringlength higher word in an array? - php

Question

In the first time, I'm sorry for my disastrous english.
After three days trying to solve this, i give up.
Giving this array:
$names = array ( "James Walter Case", "Benjamin Wallace Pinkman", "Billy Elliot Newson" )
I have to extract the full name of the higher first stringlength word of each full name.
In this case, considering this condition Benjamin will be the higher name. Once
this name extracted, I have to print the full name.
Any ideas ? Thanks

Answer 1

How about this?
$names = array ( "James Walter Case", "Benjamin Wallace Pinkman", "Billy Elliot Newson" );
if (count($names) > 0)
{
$higher_score = 0;
foreach ($names as $name_key => $name_value)
{
$name_array = explode(" ", $name_value);
// echo("<br><b>name_array -></b><pre><font FACE='arial' size='-1'>"); print_r($name_array); echo("</font></pre><br>");
$first_name = $name_array[0];
// echo "first_name -> ".$first_name."<br>";
$score = strlen($first_name);
// echo "score -> ".$score."<br>";
if ($score > $higher_score)
{
$higher_score = $score;
$winner_key = $name_key; }
}
reset($names);
}
echo("longest first name is ".$names[$winner_key]." with ".$higher_score." letters.");

Answer 2

As said before, you can use array_map to get all the lenghts of the first strings, and then get the name based on the key of that value.
$names = array ( "James Walter Case", "Benjamin Wallace Pinkman", "Billy Elliot Newson" );
$x = array_map(
function ($a) {
$x = explode (" ", $a); // split the string
return strlen($x[0]); // get the first name
}
, $names);
$maxs = array_keys($x, max($x)); // get the max values (may have equals)
echo $names[$maxs[0]]; // get the first max
-- EDIT
Actually, there is a better way of doing this, considering this case. You can simply order the array by the lenght of the first names, and then get the first key:
usort($names,
function ($a, $b) {
$aa = explode(" ", $a); // split full name
$bb = explode(" ", $b); // split full name
if (strlen($aa[0]) > strlen($bb[0])){
return 0; // if a > b, return 0
} else {
return 1; // else return 1
}
}
);
echo $names[0]; // get top element

Answer 3

Allow me to provide a handmade solution.
<?php
$maxLength = 0;
$fullName = "";
$parts = array();
foreach($names as $name){
/* Exploding the name into parts.
* For instance, "James Walter Case" results in the following array :
* array("James", "Walter", "Case") */
$parts = explode(' ', $name);
if(strlen($parts[0]) > $maxLength){ // Compare first length to the maximum.
$maxLength = strlen($parts[0]);
$fullName = $name;
}
}
echo "Longest first name belongs to " . $fullName . " (" . $maxLength . " character(s))";
?>
Basically, we iterate over the array, split each name into parts (delimited by spaces), and try to find the maximum length among first parts of names ($parts[0]). This is basically a maximum search algorithm.
There may be better ways with PHP array_* functions, but well, this one gets pretty self-explanatory.

Answer 4

You can try something like..
$maxWordLength=0;
$maxWordIndex=null;
foreach ($names as $index=>$name){
$firstName=first(explode(' ',$name));
if (strlen($firstName)>maxWordLength){
$maxWordLength=strlen($firstName);
$maxWordIndex=$index;
}
}
if ($maxWordIndex){
echo $names[$maxWordIndex];
}