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.tho...@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 > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
