How to Find the Longest String in List in Python

With Python, we can easily find the longest string in a list of strings. To find the longest string, we loop over each element, get the length of that element, and compare to the other strings to see if it is longer.

l = ["This","is","a","list","of","some","short","and","some","longer","strings"]

def getLongestString(list_of_strings):
    longest_string = ""
    for string in list_of_strings:
        if len(string) > len(longest_string):
            longest_string = string
    return longest_string

print(getLongestString(l))

#Output:
strings

You can also use the Python max() function and pass “len” to the “key” argument.

l = ["This","is","a","list","of","some","short","and","some","longer","strings"]

print(max(l,key=len))

#Output:
strings

When working with lists of strings, one piece of information which can be useful is to know the longest string in the list.

Using Python, we can get the longest string in a list of strings easily.

To find the string with the most length, we can loop over the strings in the list, compare the length of the current string to the longest string up until that point, and then if the current string is longer, we make that the new longest string.

Below is a Python function which will find the longest string in a list.

l = ["This","is","a","list","of","some","short","and","some","longer","strings"]

def getLongestString(list_of_strings):
    longest_string = ""
    for string in list_of_strings:
        if len(string) > len(longest_string):
            longest_string = string
    return longest_string

print(getLongestString(l))

#Output:
strings

Using the Python max() Function to Find Longest String in List

You can also use the max() function to find the longest string in a list. The Python max() function allows us to pass a second argument called “key” where we can apply a function.

In this case, we will be applying the Python len() function. Below is an example of how you can get the longest string in Python using the max() function.

l = ["This","is","a","list","of","some","short","and","some","longer","strings"]

print(max(l,key=len))

#Output:
strings

Hopefully this article has been useful for you to find the longest string in a list of strings using Python.