Finding longest substring in alphabetical order

Question

EDIT: I am aware that a question with similar task was already asked in SO but I\'m interested to find out the problem in this specific piece of code. I am

Answer 1

You can use nested for loops, slicing and sorted. If the string is not all lower-case then you can convert the sub-strings to lower-case before comparing using str.lower:

def solve(strs):
  maxx = ''
  for i in xrange(len(strs)):
      for j in xrange(i+1, len(strs)):
          s = strs[i:j+1]
          if ''.join(sorted(s)) == s:
              maxx = max(maxx, s, key=len)
          else:
              break
  return maxx

Output:

>>> solve('hixwluvyhzzzdgd')
'luvy'
>>> solve('eseoojlsuai')
'jlsu'
>>> solve('drurotsxjehlwfwgygygxz')
'ehlw'