Given a cell array, find the longest string

Preferably without using loops, I need to find the longest string in a cell array. So with an example array such as the following, in what ways could I go about this? If there are multiple entries with the same length, I need to be able to find both of them.

I'd like to see a way to do it with loops as well.

Pete Townshend Toyota Gene Simmons Steve Jobs Socrates Frank Sinatra Astronomy Idaho Sweatshirt

Thanks

Answer 1

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

a={'Pete' 'Townshend1' 'Simmons' 'Steve'  'Sinatra'  'Idaho' 'Sweatshirt'}
val=cellfun(@(x) numel(x),a)
out=a(val==max(val))

%With a loop

for k=1:numel(a)
  val(k)=numel(a{k})
end
out=a(val==max(val))

[Jan]

cellfun('length', a) is much more efficient, because the string methods of cellfun() are determined inside the MEX function, while the anonymous functions need to call Matlab for each argument. Unfortunately these string methods are marked as "backward compatibility" feature only in the documentation, but this is an understatement.