C Program: Largest Element in an Array

Finding the largest element in an array is applicable on arrays of type int, float and double since the greater-than or less-than operations can be performed on numbers.

For the purpose of example here, we pick an array of typeint. But the algorithm works for arrays of type float and double also. You can replace the array n[] in the program below with elements of type float or double, and the program would still work.

We first find the number of elements in the given array using the sizeof() operator as done here. The maximum number or max in the below C program is first assigned to the first element. The logic is simple. Comparisons then start from the first to the last element of the array, assigning max with the greater of the two whenever applicable.

				
				#include <stdio.h>
				int main() {
					int max, n[] = {70, 89, -32, 12, 9, 73, 12, 88, 19};
					unsigned short length, i = 0;
					length = sizeof(n)/sizeof(int);
					max = n[0];
					while(i < length) {
						if(n[i] > max)
							max = n[i];
						i++;
					}
					printf("Largest element in the array is: %d", max);
					return 0;
				}
				
			

The output of the above program would be

				
				Largest element in the array is: 89