Python: Find Shortest or Longest Word in String

In this article, we'll learn how to find the longest or the shortest word in a string.

Find the longest word in a string

Here are the steps to get the longest word in a string:

1. Split the string into a list by space using the split() method.
2. Initialize a variable to store the longest word.
3. Iterate over each word in the list.
4. Compare each word's length with the length of the current longest word.

Here is an example:

sentence = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"

words = sentence.split()  # Split the string into a list of words
longest_word = ''  # Variable to store the longest word

# Iterate over each word and compare lengths to find the longest word
for word in words:
    if len(word) > len(longest_word):
        longest_word = word

print("Longest word:", longest_word)  # Print the longest word

Output:

jumps

Find the shortest word in a string

Follow these steps to find the shortest word in a string:

1. Split the string into a list by space using the split() method.
2. Initialize a variable to store the shortest word.
3. Set the initial shortest word to be the first word in the list.
4. Iterate over each word in the list and compare its length with the length of the current shortest word.

Let's see an example.

sentence = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"

words = sentence.split()  # Split the string into a list of words

shortest_word = words[0]  # Initialize shortest_word with the first word in the list

# Iterate over each word and compare lengths to find the shortest word
for word in words:
    if len(word) < len(shortest_word):
        shortest_word = word

print("Shortest word:", shortest_word)  # Print the shortest word

Output:

Shortest word: The

As you can see, "the" is the shortest word in the list.

Conclusion

Python offers straightforward procedures for detecting a string's shortest and longest words.

Throughout this tutorial, we used the split method to find the shortest and longest words in a given string.