How to get the length of longest string in an array

Question

Say I have this array:

$array[] = 'foo'; $array[] = 'apple'; $array[] = '1234567890; 

I want to get the length of the longest string in this array. In this case the longest string is 1234567890 and its length is 10.

Is this possible without looping through the array and checking each element?

Answer 1

try

$maxlen = max(array_map('strlen', $ary)); 

Answer 2

Sure:

function getmax($array, $cur, $curmax) {   return $cur >= count($array) ? $curmax :     getmax($array, $cur + 1, strlen($array[$cur]) > strlen($array[$curmax])            ? $cur : $curmax); }  $index_of_longest = getmax($my_array, 0, 0); 

No loop there. ;-)