How can I get the length of the longest word in a value in Power Query?

[arpost]

I have a scenario where I am wanting to determine what is the length of the longest word in a value.

Value	Longest Word
A T & T	1
P B I	1
U S A United	6

I'm sure it involves using the Text.Split and then somehow using Text.Length inside a List.Max, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to achieve this. I'd love it if this were all performed in a single step rather than having multiple steps as the dataset Is quite large (300k+ records).

Any ideas?

[KNP · Accepted solution]

Paste the below into a blank query in the advanced editor to see the steps.

You were definitely on the right track.

I don't think you need to worry too much about having it as a single step, having one line of code doesn't always make it perform better, the optimisations in the background take care a lot of that for you but I'm sure you could rework these steps to a single step if you wish.

let
  Source = Table.FromRows(
    Json.Document(
      Binary.Decompress(
        Binary.FromText(
          "i45WclQIUYgpNTAwMlMIUYrViVYKUHBS8ASzQhWCFRwVQvMyS1JTlGJjAQ==",
          BinaryEncoding.Base64
        ),
        Compression.Deflate
      )
    ),
    let
      _t = ((type nullable text) meta [Serialized.Text = true])
    in
      type table [Value = _t]
  ),
  Duplicate = Table.DuplicateColumn(Source, "Value", "Value - Copy"),
  Split = Table.SplitColumn(
    Duplicate,
    "Value - Copy",
    Splitter.SplitTextByDelimiter(" ", QuoteStyle.Csv),
    {"Value - Copy.1", "Value - Copy.2", "Value - Copy.3", "Value - Copy.4"}
  ),
  Unpivot = Table.UnpivotOtherColumns(Split, {"Value"}, "Attribute", "Values"),
  Group = Table.Group(Unpivot, {"Value"}, {{"MaxWord", each List.Max([Values]), type text}}),
  AddLength = Table.AddColumn(Group, "Length", each Text.Length([MaxWord]), Int64.Type)
in
  AddLength

 Hope this helps.

[AlexisOlson · Accepted solution]

@KNP has a good solution but I'd like to suggest a single-step solution too.

Create a new custom column with this formula:

List.Max(List.Transform(Text.Split([Value], " "), each Text.Length(_)))

[KNP · Accepted solution]

Paste the below into a blank query in the advanced editor to see the steps.

You were definitely on the right track.

I don't think you need to worry too much about having it as a single step, having one line of code doesn't always make it perform better, the optimisations in the background take care a lot of that for you but I'm sure you could rework these steps to a single step if you wish.

let
  Source = Table.FromRows(
    Json.Document(
      Binary.Decompress(
        Binary.FromText(
          "i45WclQIUYgpNTAwMlMIUYrViVYKUHBS8ASzQhWCFRwVQvMyS1JTlGJjAQ==",
          BinaryEncoding.Base64
        ),
        Compression.Deflate
      )
    ),
    let
      _t = ((type nullable text) meta [Serialized.Text = true])
    in
      type table [Value = _t]
  ),
  Duplicate = Table.DuplicateColumn(Source, "Value", "Value - Copy"),
  Split = Table.SplitColumn(
    Duplicate,
    "Value - Copy",
    Splitter.SplitTextByDelimiter(" ", QuoteStyle.Csv),
    {"Value - Copy.1", "Value - Copy.2", "Value - Copy.3", "Value - Copy.4"}
  ),
  Unpivot = Table.UnpivotOtherColumns(Split, {"Value"}, "Attribute", "Values"),
  Group = Table.Group(Unpivot, {"Value"}, {{"MaxWord", each List.Max([Values]), type text}}),
  AddLength = Table.AddColumn(Group, "Length", each Text.Length([MaxWord]), Int64.Type)
in
  AddLength

 Hope this helps.

[AlexisOlson]

This is good but I'd like to offer a suggestion to make it a bit better.

You can split into rows instead of columns to avoid the unpivot step and make the query more robust against new data that would need to be split into more columns.