find longest word in a string

Question

Currently trying to figure out how to find the longest word in as string and my research has gotten me somewhere. I found a code on SO that shows the amount of alphabets in the longest word

Example

function longest(str) {
  var words = str.split(' ');
  var longest = 0;

  for (var i=0;i<words.length;i++) {
    if (words[i].length > longest) {
      longest = words[i].length;
    }
  }
  return longest;
}
longest("This is Andela");

//This returns 6

How do i edit this code such that it returns the word instead of the amount of alphabets.That is

//Returns Andela instead of 6

Considering i am also new to javascript

Answer 1

There you go:

function longest(str) {
  var words = str.split(' ');
  var longest = ''; // changed

  for (var i = 0; i < words.length; i++) {
    if (words[i].length > longest.length) { // changed
      longest = words[i]; // changed
    }
  }
  return longest;
}
console.log(longest("This is Andela"));

Answer 2

I think the easiest solution is to split, sort the array by length and then pick the first element of the array.

function longest(str) { 

 var arr = str.split(" ");

 var sorted = arr.sort(function (a,b) {return b.length > a.length;});

return sorted[0];

}

If you want the length, just add .length to return sorted[0].