Python program to find the longest word in a sentence

Given a string S consisting of lowercase English alphabets, the task is to print the longest word present in the given string in python.

Examples:

Input: S = “be confident and be yourself”
Output: “confident”
Explanation:
Words present in the sentence are “be”, “confident”, “and”, “be” and “yourself”.
Length of each of the words are 2, 9, 3, 2, and 8 respectively.
Therefore, the longest word is “confident”.

Input: S = “geeks for geeks”
Output: “geeks”

Searching-based Approach: Refer to this article to solve this problem by performing the following steps:

• Iterate over the characters of the string.
• Check if the current character encountered is a space or end of the string is reached.
• If the current character is found to be so, update the maximum length of a word obtained.
• Finally, print the longest word obtained using substr() method.

Time Complexity: O(N)
Auxiliary Space: O(1)

Approach using sorted() method: The idea is to split the string into separate words and store in a list. Then, sort the list in the order of increasing length using the sorted() method. Print the last string in the sorted list.

Below is the implementation of the above approach:

confident

Time Complexity: O(N * logN)
Auxiliary Space: O(1)