working on a program to find the longest word in an entered line

[gabec94]

I am writing a program that accepts a sentence and then prints out the longest line, this is what I have so far, but I am lost on what the x variable should be equal to. Any help is appreciated, thanks.

sent=raw_input('Enter sentence:')
splicedsent=sent.split(" ")
longestword=splicedsent[0]
if x in range(splicedsent[1:])>splicedsent[0]:
print x
else:
longestword=splicedsent[0]
print "Longest word:", longestword

[stephendoyle75]

You will need to examine the length of each word to determine its length. The current compare is doing a lexicographic compare not a length compare. Use len()

[gabec94]

I have worked on this for a few hrs and this is what I now have, it still isnt right. I am not sure what is wrong, and what to set the variable x to. Thanks a lot for all the help

sent=raw_input('Enter sentence:')
splicedsent=sent.split(" ")
longestword=splicedsent[0]
if x in len(splicedsent[1:])>splicedsent[0]:
print x
else:
longestword=splicedsent[0]
print "Longest word:", longestword

[stephendoyle75]

The line:

if x in len(splicedsent[1:])>splicedsent[0]:

should be something like:

if len(splicedsent[1:]) > len(splicedsent[0]):

At this point, you have determined that the 2nd word is longer than the first word. To make this more generic and be able to deal with the case where there are more than two words in the sentence, you need to iterate over them using a for loop or something similar.

[stephendoyle75]

Or to give a more direct hint:

longestLength = 0
longestWord = ''

for word in splicedsent:
    if len(word) > longestLength:
        # Update longestLength and longestWord

[gabec94]

The minute you sent that reply, I figured that out. But after the if statement I set longestword=word, but that is wrong, and prints the first item in the list as the longestword. This is what I have, it now makes the last word the longest? I am still confused, thanks for all of your help so far.

sent=raw_input('Enter sentence:')
splicedsent=sent.split(" ")
longestLength = 0
longestword = ''
for word in splicedsent:
    if len(word) > longestLength:
        longestword=word
print "Longest word:", longestword

[woooee]

it now makes the last word the longest?

Add some print statements and you should be able to see what is going on.

for word in splicedsent:
    print "\ncomparing word %s, length=%d, longest=%s" % \
             (word, len(word), longestLength)
    if len(word) > longestLength:
        longestword=word
        print "length > longest is true"

[gabec94]

ok so that compares each word entered to the longest, which is set as zero. But I need to make longest the length of the first word that I enter, and compare it to the rest, if the compared word is longer than the stored word, then it replaces the stored word and so on, until it has checked all the words entered and it prints the word that is stored. But I am still lost about how to do that.

[stephendoyle75]

Try this ...

for word in splicedsent:
    if len(word) > longestLength:
        longestword=word
        longestLength = len(word)

[gabec94]

Thanks a ton, but if there are two or more words with the same length, would you use a similar code to print multiple words?
I tried doing this, but it is evaluating it as true, because it is a boolean statement, but I am not sure how to set the multiple words equal to something, any ideas...this is what I have:

sent=raw_input('Enter sentence:')
splicedsent=sent.split(" ")
longestLength = 0
longestWords = ''
for word in splicedsent:
    if len(word) > longestLength:
        longestWords=word
        longestLength=len(word)
    if longestWords > 1:
        longestWords=longestWords > 1        
print "Longest word(s):", longestWords

[stephendoyle75]

You need to use a list for holding the longest words if you need to capture multiple words of the same length.

sent=raw_input('Enter sentence:')
splicedsent=sent.split(" ")
longestLength = 0
longestWords = []
for word in splicedsent:
    if len(word) > longestLength:
        longestWords = [word]
        longestLength = len(word)
    elif len(word) == longestLength:
        longestWords.append(word)
print "Longest word(s):", longestWords

Or if you to format the longestWords a bit better than just dumping the list:

print "Longest word(s):", ', '.join(longestWords)

[gabec94]

thanks a ton for all of your help it is greatly appreciated