Find Largest Element of an Array in C++

An array contains multiple elements and the largest element in an array is the one that is greater than other elements.

For example.

In the above array, 7 is the largest element and it is at index 2.

A program to find the largest element of an array is given as follows.

Example

 Live Demo

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main() {
   int a[] = {4, 9, 1, 3, 8};
   int largest, i, pos;
   largest = a[0];
   for(i=1; i<5; i++) {
      if(a[i]>largest) {
         largest = a[i];
         pos = i;
      }
   }
   cout<<"The largest element in the array is "<<largest<<" and it is at index "<<pos;
   return 0;
}

Output

The largest element in the array is 9 and it is at index 1

In the above program, a[] is the array that contains 5 elements. The variable largest will store the largest element of the array.

Initially largest stores the first element of the array. Then a for loop is started which runs from the index 1 to n. For each iteration of the loop, the value of largest is compared with a[i]. If a[i] is greater than largest, then that value is stored in largest. And the corresponding value of i is stored in pos.

This is demonstrated by the following code snippet.

for(i=1; i<5; i++) {
   if(a[i]>largest) {
      largest = a[i];
      pos = i;
   }
}

After this, the value of the largest element in the array and its position is printed.

This is shown as follows −

cout<<"The largest element in the array is "<<largest<<" and it is at index "<<pos;