Say I have this array:
$array[] = 'foo'; $array[] = 'apple'; $array[] = '1234567890; I want to get the length of the longest string in this array. In this case the longest string is 1234567890 and its length is 10.
Is this possible without looping through the array and checking each element?
try
$maxlen = max(array_map('strlen', $ary)); 
"strlen" is beautiful, you should look at JavaScript that passes strlen directly or Java that passes ::strlen instead. Passing strings as callables is the source of a lot of language design problems in PHP.Sure:
function getmax($array, $cur, $curmax) { return $cur >= count($array) ? $curmax : getmax($array, $cur + 1, strlen($array[$cur]) > strlen($array[$curmax]) ? $cur : $curmax); } $index_of_longest = getmax($my_array, 0, 0); No loop there. ;-)
A small addition to the ticket. I came here with a similar problem: Often you have to output just the longest string in an array.
For this, you can also use the top solution and extend it a little:
$lengths = array_map('strlen', $ary); $longestString = $ary[array_search(max($lengths), $lengths)]; Loop through the arrays and use strlen to verify if the current length is longer than the previous.. and save the index of the longest string in a variable and use it later where you need that index.
Something like this..
$longest = 0; for($i = 0; $i < count($array); $i++) { if($i > 0) { if(strlen($array[$i]) > strlen($array[$longest])) { $longest = $i; } } } 
This way you can find the shortest (or longest) element, but not its index.
$shortest = array_reduce($array, function ($a, $b) { if ($a === null) { return $b; } return strlen($a) < strlen($b) ? $a : $b; }); This's how to get the longest string "itself" from an array
$array = ['aa', 'b', 'c']; $longest_str = array_reduce($array, fn ($carry, $item) => strlen($item) > strlen($carry) ? $item : $carry, ""); echo $longest_str; // aa 