How to find length of an element in a list?

Question

I'm just starting with programming. I have a list of a few strings and now I need to print the biggest (in length) one. So I first want to just print the lengths of elements. I was trying things like this:

l = ("xxxxxxxxx", "yyyy","zz")

for i in range(len(l):

So how do I do it?

Answer 1

To print the lengths of the elements:

elements = ["xxxxxx", "yyy", "z"]
for element in elements:
    print len(element)

I recommend you read some tutorial material, for instance http://docs.python.org/tutorial/

Answer 2

The following code will print the largest string in the set:

l = ["abcdev", "xx","abcedeerer"]
len_0 = len(l[0])
pos = 0

for i in range(0,len(l)):
        if len(l[i]) > len_0:
                pos = i
print l[pos]

Answer 3

just ask for the max according to the length

print max(["qsf","qsqsdqsd","qs"], key = len)

Answer 4

l = ("xxxxxxxxx", "yyyy","zz")
print(max(l, key=len))

First of all you don't have a list, you have a tuple. this code will work for any sequence, however; both lists and tuples are sequences (as well as strings, sets, etc). So, the max function takes a key argument, that is used to sort the elements of an iterable. So, from all elements of l will be selected the one having the maximum length.

Answer 5

>>> sorted(['longest','long','longer'],key=len)[-1]
'longest'

UPDATE: SilentGhost's solution is a lot nicer.

Answer 6

thanks guys for all the great solutions. And sorry for the confusion about lists and tuples.