Solution for last part of
Programming Practice: Arrays

Arrays of strings

Suppose strArray is an array of String objects that has been declared, created, and filled. 

• Write a code fragment that finds the index of the longest string in strArray.  What happens in your solution if
  • there's a tie (i.e., if more that one string has the greatest length)?  Which index do you find (the index of the first string with the greatest length, the index of the last string with the greatest length, or ...)?
  • there are empty strings ("") in strArray?
  • there are null elements in strArray?

Solution:

// start out with the maximum length being the length of the first string
// and the location of where the maximum length occurs being the first string

int maxLength = (strArray[0] == null) ? 0 : strArray[0].length;  
// this takes into account the possibility that the first item is null
int maxIndex = 0;

for (int i = 0; i < strArr.length; i++) {
    if (strArr[i] != null &&              // only consider non-null array locations
        strArr[i].length() > maxLength) { // if we've found a longer string
            maxLength = strArr[i];        // update the max info
            maxIndex = i;
    }
}

If there is a tie, this code will find the index of the first item with the maximum length (because we used ">", if we had used ">=" then we would have found the index of the last such item).  Note that empty strings are not a concern - they are just String objects (with a length of 0).