Longest Word in Every Language

Welcome to the Longest Word page! Here, you'll find a description of the project as well as a list of sample programs written in various languages.

Description

Given a string, this program should break it up into words and determine the length of the longest word. In this case, a word is defined as anything surrounded by whitespace. For simplicity, we'll restrict whitespace to the following four special characters:

• Spaces: " "
• Tabs: "\t"
• Newlines: "\n"
• Carriage Returns: "\r"

For example, if we had a string, "How now brown cow", we can figure out which word is the longest by breaking up the string into words. In this case, this string has the following four words:

• "How"
• "now"
• "brown"
• "cow"

In this case, "brown" is clearly the longest word, so we'll return 5 as a result.

Requirements

To satisfy the requirements, a program must accept a string on the command line and return the length of the longest word in the string:

$ ./longest-word-in-string.lang "Google do a barrel roll"
$ 6

In this case, we have a string with 5 words. It appears that there are two words that share the largest number of characters: Google and barrel. Naturally, we don't care to decide between the two words. Instead, we return the length of them both: 6.

Testing

The following table contains various test cases that you can use to verify the correctness of your solution:

Description	Input	Output
No Input		"Usage: please provide a string"
Empty Input	""	"Usage: please provide a string"
Sample Input: Many Words	"May the force be with you"	5
Sample Input: Single Word	"Floccinaucinihilipilification"	29
Sample Input: Multiline	"Hi,\nMy name is Paul!"	5

As always, these tests will be run against any code submitted to the repo via [Glotter][glotter-github].

Articles

• Longest Word in Python

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