Extract longest word in string

Question

I would like to find and extract the longest word of a string, if possible using a tidyverse package.

library(tidyverse)

tbl <- tibble(a=c("ab cde", "bcde f", "cde fg"), b=c("cde", "bcde", "cde"))
tbl
# A tibble: 3 x 1
   a
<chr>
1 ab cde
2 bcde f
3 cde fg

The result I am looking for is:

# A tibble: 3 x 2
   a     b
  <chr> <chr>
1 ab cde   cde
2 bcde f  bcde
3 cde fg   cde

The closest post to the question I have found is this: longest word in a string. Does anyone have an idea for an even simpler way?

Answer 1

Solution using base R:

# Using OPs provided data
tbl$b <- sapply(strsplit(tbl$a, " "), function(x) x[which.max(nchar(x))])

Explanation:

• Split each line into words (strsplit)
• Determine word length (nchar)
• Select which word is longest in line (which.max)