查找从用户输入创建的单词表中最长单词的功能

Question

Again, having trouble wrapping my head around an assignment. I have a list which is created by user input, and I want to find the longest word from the list. I have been able to get the list but my output is incorrect and I am having an issue trying to compare the words from the list. I realize this is a duplicate question in a couple of other threads but after trying those suggestions I am still having an issue. This is what I have thus far, and thank you in advance:

def find_longest_word(wordList):  
    longest=''
    previous=''
    for word in wordList:
        if len(word)>len(longest):
            longest=word
            print(longest)
        else:
            previous=word
            print(previous)




print('Please enter a few words and I will find the longest word:','\n')         
words = input()
print('\n')
wordList = words.split()
print('The list of words entered is:','\n')
print(wordList)

find_longest_word(wordList) 

Answer 1

Have you tried the following?

def find_longest_word(wordList):
    return max(wordList, key=len)

This simple line finds the maximum value of the wordList, comparing the values in the list by their length.

Answer 2

Let's define a list of words as such:

wordList = ['word', 'longestWord', 'shorter']

You can find the index of the longest word with

maxIndex = max(enumerate(map(lambda x: len(x), wordList)), key=(lambda x: x[1]))

and finally see the longest word with:

wordList[maxIndex[0]]