LongestWord("the $$$longest# word is coderbyte"); => coderbyte
function LongestWord(sen) {
// we use the regex match function which searches the string for the
// pattern and returns an array of strings it finds
// in our case the pattern we define below returns words with
// only the characters a through z and 0 through 9, stripping away punctuation
// e.g. "hello$% ##all" becomes [hello, all]
var arr = sen.match(/[a-z0-9]+/gi);
// the array sort function takes a function as a parameter
// which is used to compare each element in the array to the
// next element in the array
var sorted = arr.sort(function(a, b) {
return b.length - a.length;
});
// this array now contains all the words in the original
// string but in order from longest to shortest length
// so we simply return the first element
return sorted[0];
}
LongestWord("the $$$longest# word is coderbyte");