[R] Determine the Length of the Longest Word in a String

[Gabor Grothendieck]

Using strapply, we extract all strings of word characters
and apply nchar to each simplifying by taking the max.

library(gsubfn)
strapply(shadstr, "\\w+", nchar, simplify = max)

See the info on the gsubfn home page:
http://gsubfn.googlecode.com
as well as the vignette, help file and demos.

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 4:40 PM, Shadley Thomas
<shadley.thomas at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> I'm new to programming R and have accomplished my goal, but feel that there
> is probably a more efficient way of coding this.  I'd appreciate any
> guidance that a more advanced programmer can provide.
>
> My goal --
> I would like to find the length of the longest word in a string containing
> many words separated by spaces.
>
> How I did it --
> I was able to find the length of the longest word by parsing the string into
> a list of separate words, using the function "which.max" to determine the
> element with the longest length, and then using "nchar" to calculate the
> length of that particular word.
>
> My question --
> It seems inefficient to determine which element is the longest and then
> calculate the length of that longest element.  I was hoping to find a way to
> simply return the length of the longest word in a more straightforward way.
>
> Short sample code --
>> shadstr <- c("My string of words with varying lengths.  Longest word is
> nine - 1 22 333 999999999 4444")
>> shadvector <- unlist(strsplit(shadstr, split=" "))
>> shadvlength <- lapply(shadvector,nchar)
>> shadmaxind <- which.max(shadvlength) ## Maximum element
>> shadmax <- nchar(shadvector[shadmaxind])
>> shadmax
> [1] 9
>
> Many thanks for your help and suggestions.
> Shad
>
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>
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