[JS] [CS3] Finding the longest instance of a paragraph style

Question

I'm pretty new to JS but I'm trying to write a script that will return the longest instance of each paragraph style in a manuscript (which has been imported into InDesign). Currently, my script lists all the paragraph styles found in the document and puts them in a new document. My next thought was to loop through the style names array and find the longest instance.
Could anyone point me in the right direction on how to do this?
Any help is much appreciated. I'm learning a lot reading this forum.

Answer 1

Your question is slightly ambiguous. Do you mean you are looking for the longest instance of a paragraph in that paragraph style? That's the most likely meaning. Or are you looking for the longest run of text in that style? Because that's what you'll find if you're not careful in your script.
The essence of the script would be:
1. Setup a FindText for the paragraph style in question (or each style if you're looping through them all).
setupFindText(); // use function to setup the find -- search this forum on setupFindText to find it
app.findTextPreferences.appliedParagraphStyle = myStyle; // where myStyle is the style in question
2. Issue the find getting all the references into a variable.
var myFinds = app.documents[0].findText();
3. Loop through all the finds to locate the longest paragraph.
var longestLength = 0;
var longestPara = null;
for (var j = myFinds.length - 1; j >= 0; j--) {
     myParas = myFinds[j].paragraphs;
     for (var k = myParas.length - 1; k >= 0; k--) {
          myPara = myParas[k];
          if (myPara.length > longestLength) {
               longestLength = myPara.length;
               longestPara = myPara;
4. Make sure that longestPara is not null (no instances found); If not, then longestPara is a reference to the longest instance
Dave