Finding the longest word in a String- cannot return the value of the longest word

JavaScript
1

Tell us what’s happening:

After splitting the string into an array of words, my code won’t return the number of the longest word in the string. Any help in what could be the problem?
Your code so far


function findLongestWordLength(str) {
return str.split('')
.reduce(function(x,y) {
  return Math.max(x, y.length)
}, 0);
}
findLongestWordLength("The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog");
findLongestWordLength("May the force be with you");

Your browser information:

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/81.0.4044.138 Safari/537.36.

Challenge: Find the Longest Word in a String

Link to the challenge:

2

are you sure that is what’s going on?

try adding a console.log statement

function findLongestWordLength(str) {
const arr = str.split('')
console.log(arr)
return arr.reduce(function(x,y) {
  return Math.max(x, y.length)
}, 0);
}

is it happening what you expect?

3

Hello, thank you for your quick reply, after inserting the console.log(arr) statement, it does break down the string into the words, but my code still won’t return the length value of the longest word.

Thank You.

4

Are you sure? Because for example for findLongestWordLength("May the force be with you"); what I see in the console is

[
  'M', 'a', 'y', ' ', 't', 'h',
  'e', ' ', 'f', 'o', 'r', 'c',
  'e', ' ', 'b', 'e', ' ', 'w',
  'i', 't', 'h', ' ', 'y', 'o',
  'u'
]
5

Yes, thats what I get as well, but it keeps stating that it needs to return the number 5 due to force being the longest word in the string.

6

you are comparing the length of each string inside the array, all of them have length 1, there is nothing in there with length of 5, so from reduce the value that come out is 1

You have not broken down the string into the words, but into the letters.

7

Hello ieahleen, thank you for your input. I have re-done my code below, and I am still getting an issue where it is not denoting the number that corresponds to the length of the longest word in the string. All it does is return the number 1. If you have any insights on this, it would be much appreciated. Thank You,

function findLongestWord(str) {
  var strSplit = str.split(' ');
  var longestWord = 0;
  for(var i = 0; i < strSplit.length; i++){
    if(strSplit[i].length > longestWord){
	longestWord = strSplit[i].length;
     }
  }
  return longestWord;
}
findLongestWord("The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog");
8

what are you using to see that it is just returning ‘1’?

9

You renamed the function, it has to been named findLongestWordLength.