Length of the Last Word

Given a string s consisting of words and spaces, your task is to find the length of the last word in the string. A "word" is defined as a maximal substring consisting of non-space characters only. This is a common string manipulation task encountered in various programming scenarios, from text processing to command-line interfaces.

Problem Description

Your goal is to write a function that takes a string s as input and returns an integer representing the length of the last word.

Key Requirements:

• Identify words within the string, where words are separated by one or more spaces.
• Determine the "last" word, which is the word that appears furthest to the right in the string.
• Return the number of characters in that last word.

Expected Behavior:

• The function should correctly handle strings with leading spaces, trailing spaces, and multiple spaces between words.
• If the string contains only spaces or is empty, the length of the last word should be considered 0.

Edge Cases to Consider:

• An empty input string.
• A string containing only spaces.
• A string with trailing spaces.
• A string with leading spaces.
• A string with multiple spaces between words.
• A string with a single word.

Examples

Example 1:

Input: s = "Hello World"
Output: 5
Explanation: The last word is "World", which has a length of 5.

Example 2:

Input: s = "   fly me   to   the moon  "
Output: 4
Explanation: The last word is "moon", which has a length of 4.

Example 3:

Input: s = "luffy is still joyboy"
Output: 6
Explanation: The last word is "joyboy", which has a length of 6.

Example 4:

Input: s = "a"
Output: 1
Explanation: The last word is "a", which has a length of 1.

Example 5:

Input: s = " "
Output: 0
Explanation: The string contains only spaces, so the length of the last word is 0.

Constraints

• 1 <= s.length <= 10^4
• s consists of only English letters and spaces ' '.
• There will be at least one word in s if s is not empty and does not consist solely of spaces.

Notes

• Consider how you can efficiently process the string to find the last word.
• Think about how to handle whitespace at the beginning and end of the string.
• The problem statement guarantees that if the string is not empty and not all spaces, there will be at least one word. This simplifies some edge case handling.