Max words

You are given an array of sentences. Write a script to return the maximum number of words that appear in a single sentence.

Examples

Example 1
Input: @sentences = ('Hello world', 'This is a test',
   'Perl is great')
Output: 4

Example 2
Input: @sentences = ('Single')
Output: 1

Example 3
Input: @sentences = ('Short',
   'This sentence has seven words in total', 'A B C',
   'Just four words here')
Output: 7

Example 4
Input: @sentences = ('One', 'Two parts',
   'Three part phrase', '')
Output: 3

Example 5
Input: @sentences = ('The quick brown fox jumps over the 
   lazy dog', 'A', 'She sells seashells by the seashore',
   'To be or not to be that is the question')
Output: 10

Analysis

Clearly the solution to this is to count the words in each sentence and find the largest.

The only slight doubt is where words include non-letters, such as George's 4 egg-cups, but failing any instruction to the contrary I assumed that words are groups of characters separated by one or more whitespace characters (\s in regex speak).

Peter's solutions are methodically crafted, resembling production-grade scripts one might write for a business system. The code is not minimalistic but is instead self-contained, well-documented, and robust, with a focus on teachable insights.

Try it 

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Blog: http://ccgi.campbellsmiths.force9.co.uk/challenge

use v5.26;    # The Weekly Challenge - 2025-12-22
use utf8;     # Week 353 - task 1 - Max words
use warnings; # Peter Campbell Smith
binmode STDOUT, ':utf8';
use Encode;

max_words('Hello world', 'This is a test', 'Perl is great');
max_words('The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog', 
    'A', 'She sells seashells by the seashore', 'To be or 
    not to be that is the question');
max_words('one', 'two', 'three');
max_words("George's boots are clean");
max_words("she said 'ice-cream is lovely'");
max_words();

sub max_words {
    
    my (@sentences, $max_words, $sentence, @words);
    
    # initialise
    @sentences = @_;
    $max_words = 0;
    
    # loop over sentences
    for $sentence (@sentences) {
        
        # split into words and count them
        @words = split('\s+', $sentence);
        $max_words = @words if @words > $max_words;
    }
    
    
    say qq{\nInput:  [} . join('], [', @sentences) . ']';
    say qq[Output: $max_words];
}

9 lines of code

Output from script

Input:  [Hello world], [This is a test], [Perl is great]
Output: 4

Input:  [The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog],
   [A], [She sells seashells by the seashore], [To be or 
   not to be that is the question]
Output: 10

Input:  [one], [two], [three]
Output: 1

Input:  [George's boots are clean]
Output: 4

Input:  [she said 'ice-cream is lovely']
Output: 5

Input:  []
Output: 0