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

[Kingsford Jones]

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Shadley Thomas
<shadley.thomas at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> 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=" "))

nchar is vectorized, so at this point you can just do

> max(nchar(shadvector))
[1] 9

hth,
Kingsford Jones


>> 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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