The longest word

[Bearophile]

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