Ruby getting the longest word of a sentence

Question

I\'m trying to create method named longest_word that takes a sentence as an argument and The function will return the longest word of the sentence.

My c

Answer 1

Funcional Style Version

str.split(' ').reduce { |r, w| w.length > r.length ? w : r }

Another solution using max

str.split(' ').max { |a, b| a.length <=> b.length }

Answer 2

def longest_word(sentence)
  longest_word = ""
  words = sentence.split(" ")
  words.each do |word|
    longest_word = word unless word.length < longest_word.length
  end
  longest_word
end

That's a simple way to approach it. You could also strip the punctuation using a gsub method.

Answer 3

It depends on how you want to split the string. If you are happy with using a single space, than this works:

def longest(source)
  arr = source.split(" ")
  arr.sort! { |a, b| b.length <=> a.length }
  arr[0]
end

Otherwise, use a regular expression to catch whitespace and puntuaction.

Answer 4

If you truly want to do it in the Ruby way it would be:

def longest(sentence)

     sentence.split(' ').sort! { |a, b| b.length <=> a.length }[0]

end

Answer 5

Using regexp will allow you to take into consideration punctuation marks.

s = "lorem ipsum, loremmm ipsummm? loremm ipsumm...."

first longest word:

s.split(/[^\w]+/).max_by(&:length)
# => "loremmm"
# or using scan
s.scan(/\b\w+\b/).max_by(&:length)
# => "loremmm"

Also you may be interested in getting all longest words:

s.scan(/\b\w+\b/).group_by(&:length).sort.last.last
# => ["loremmm", "ipsummm"] 

Answer 6

sort_by! and reverse!

def longest_word(sentence)
  longw = sentence.split(" ")
  longw.sort_by!(&:length).reverse!
  p longw[0]
end

longest_word("once upon a time long ago a very longword")