longestWord.js

// Description: For this challenge you will be determining the largest word in a string.

const 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]
  let 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
  let 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];
         
}
   
console.log(LongestWord("the ##quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"));