Finding the longest word in a sentence is a short but genuinely useful string-and-list exercise — it combines splitting a sentence into words with tracking a running "best so far" value, a pattern that shows up constantly in programming interviews.
The approach: split the sentence on whitespace to get a list of words, then scan through it — much like looping through a list of numbers to find the largest — keeping track of whichever word is longest so far.
Python Program to Find the Longest Word in a Sentence
sentence = "Python programs become more interesting as problems get challenging"
words = sentence.split()
longest = words[0]
for word in words:
if len(word) > len(longest):
longest = word
print(f"The longest word is: {longest} ({len(longest)} letters)")Output:
The longest word is: interesting (11 letters)
Look closely at the sentence: both "interesting" and "challenging" are 11 letters long. Because the condition uses a strict > rather than >=, the first word to reach that length — "interesting" — wins the tie and is never replaced by the later word of equal length. If you wanted the last longest word instead, you'd simply change the comparison to >=.
sentence.split() with no arguments is doing quiet, useful work here too — it splits on any run of whitespace and automatically discards empty strings, so extra spaces between words won't produce blank "words" that could otherwise interfere with the length comparison.