Longest word in a string - php

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

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

Answer 5

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 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);