Programming Forums - Find the longest word

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Find the longest word

I've got this other program which I came up with on my own, and I'm not sure if I'm even going about it the right way, cuz I really haven't studied arrays that much yet. The program has three words in an array of strings and uses a loop to find out which word was the longest:



int main()

{

        string words[] = {"Bank", "Office", "Mississippi"};

    string max = words[0];

        

        for (int i = 0; i< 3; i++)



                if (words[i] > max)

              max = words[i];



                  cout << "The longest word was " << max;



                  cout << endl;



        return 0;

}

But when I run the program it says the longest word is "Office", when the longest word is really "Mississippi."

So I don't know if there is something wrong with my loop like maybe it's only executing two times and stopping at "Office" or what.

Like I said, I'm not even sure I'm going about this the right way.

Yeah, I think I discovered why the program is reporting that the longest word was "Office". Its comparing character codes. The letter 'O' comes after the letter 'M' and thus has a greater ASCII code.

But is there a way to write the program so it will show which word is the longest(has the most characters in it)?

if (words [i].size () > max.size ()) max = words [i];