Return the length of the longest word in a string

JavaScript
1

Tell us what’s happening:

Okay, so below is the code I wrote. It works for all the tests but oddly fails for the last test which has a really long word in the string. What am I missing? :neutral_face:
Your code so far


function findLongestWordLength(str) {

let strArr = [...str];

let count = 0;
let newCount = 0;

for(let i = 0; i < strArr.length; i++) {
  if(strArr[i] != " ") {
    count += 1;
  } else if(strArr[i] == " " && newCount < count) {
    newCount = count;
    count = 0;
  } else {
    count = 0;
  }
}

return newCount;
}

findLongestWordLength("The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog");

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User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_3) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.0.5 Safari/605.1.15.

Challenge: Find the Longest Word in a String

Link to the challenge:
https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/javascript-algorithms-and-data-structures/basic-algorithm-scripting/find-the-longest-word-in-a-string

2

Your code doesn’t actually check the last word in any case, because of how the if-statements check for a space character.

You could try to split the string into words instead of characters and check these …

(Did I say “check” already? :sweat_smile:)

3

Why then is it working for the other tests? Can you explain more? TIA.

4

Because in the other tests the last word isn’t the longest one. So it doesn’t matter that the last word isn’t counted.

1 Like
5

Ooooooohhhhhh. Fascinating! Thank you! On it!

6

So I tried a little something but it still didn’t work.

function findLongestWordLength(str) {

  let strArr = [...str];
  
  let count = 0;
  let newCount = 0;

  for(let i = 0; i <= strArr.length; i++) {
    if(strArr[i] != " ") {
      count += 1;
    } else if((strArr[i] == " " || strArr[i] == undefined) && newCount < count) {
      newCount = count;
      count = 0;
    } else {
      count = 0;
    }
  }

  return newCount;
}

console.log(findLongestWordLength("What if we try a super-long word such as otorhinolaryngology"));

As you can see, I added a condition that states that newCount will be updated to count only if -

if((strArr[i] == " " || strArr[i] == undefined) && newCount < count)

With the for loop running for i <= strArr.length, shouldn’t the modification work? When it is at the last letter of the string, it will try strArr[strArr.length] which will be undefined so it should check the count as usual.

7

No matter. Got it! I had to change the first if condition as well to -

strArr[i] != " " && strArr[i] != undefined

Thanks so much!

8

You may want to learn about the split() method:

1 Like
9

Hey thanks! I’ll check it out! :slight_smile: