Finding the Longest Word in a String with a regex

[zyker.tompos]

I was attempting to find the longest possible word inside a string. I thought an interesting solution would be to use a regex to find the longest possible string of characters inside spaces. My code looks like this:

function findLongestWordLength(str) {
  const regex = /([a-z]+)/gi;
  return str.match(regex).length;
}

This would return an array with all the words and not the longest. My code solution looks like this:

function findLongestWordLength(str) {
  const regex = /([a-z]+)/gi;
  const matches = str.match(regex);
  let last_longest = 0;
  for (let i = 0; i<matches.length; i++){
    if (matches[i].length > last_longest){
      last_longest = matches[i].length;
    }
  }
  return last_longest;
}

Is there any way to find the longest word in a string with an array?
The problem link is here: Problem

[admit8490]

What if your string contains some ridiculous words like “you/be”.
I get it, in this problem there are no such test cases. But I myself would try to handle this for the sake of learning.
No thoughts about array for now.

But some time ago I was dealing with the same kind of stuff using Python.
I was using lists.
Python Lists and JS Arrays are somewhat similar. I think there is the way.

EDIT. No promises, but I can try to find relevant snippets on my PC. Such snippets written in Python, but I think i can ‘translate it’.

[yuvi1]

Why using Regex ?
I suggest to convert the string to an Array using split() method, and then find the longest word with a For Loop of array[i].length ( In each iteration you compare the current word length with the next one).

Hope that helps.

[admit8490]

Yeah, I was exporting bunch of words separated by spaces from the file.
Stuff from file originally is a string.
Then I used type conversion, and every word became list element(in JS it will be array’s element).
Then I was looping through to find what I need.

It was not only the longest word, but some other stuff:
word with specific letters, word with capital letters etc

[zyker.tompos]

I understand and have looked at the solutions using an array. I just thought using a regex could theoretically would be faster than dividing the words into an array and searching it. Thank you for helping me.