PPA-4

Question

A list L of words is already given to you. Print the longest word in the list. If there are multiple words with the same maximum length, print the one which appears at the rightmost end of the list.

Hint

Consider the following snippet of code.

max_word, max_len = '', 0
for word in L:
    if len(word) > max_len:
        max_len = len(word)
        max_word = word

At the end of execution of this code, do you think max_word is the longest word in the list L as per the conditions given in the question.

Key-point

While iterating through a list of strings, make it a point to avoid the use of indices as much as possible. That is, try to avoid the following:

for i in range(len(L)):
    ## do something with L[i] ##

Rather, use the following template:

for word in L:
    ## do something with word ##

Though both of them end up doing the same thing, the second template is more readable and Pythonic. That said, there would be problems (check next one) where you would require both the string and its index in the list. What can be done in such situations? Python provides a facility called enumerate for this.

enumerate

L = ['zero', 'one', 'two', 'three']
for index, word in enumerate(L):
    print(index, word)

This gives the following output:

0 zero
1 one
2 two
3 three

Instead of a single loop variable, note that we have two loop variables — index and word in line-2 of the code. Don’t worry about why this works. The rationale behind this will become clear when we discuss tuples in week-6. The point to keep in mind is that Python provides a way to iterate through a list in a clean way without having to use the unwieldy range(len(L)) construct.

Solution

max_word, max_len = '', 0
for word in L:
    if len(word) >= max_len:
        max_len = len(word)
        max_word = word
print(max_word)

Question

Hint

Solution

Video Solution