Given an integer array nums
sorted in non-decreasing order, remove the duplicates in-place such that each unique element appears only once. The relative order of the elements should be kept the same. Then return the number of unique elements in nums
.
Consider the number of unique elements of nums
to be k
, to get accepted, you need to do the following things:
- Change the array
nums
such that the firstk
elements ofnums
contain the unique elements in the order they were present innums
initially. The remaining elements ofnums
are not important as well as the size ofnums
. - Return
k
.
Custom Judge:
The judge will test your solution with the following code:int[] nums = […]; // Input array int[] expectedNums = […]; // The expected answer with correct length int k = removeDuplicates(nums); // Calls your implementation assert k == expectedNums.length; for (int i = 0; i < k; i++) { assert nums[i] == expectedNums[i]; }
If all assertions pass, then your solution will be accepted.
Example 1:
Input: nums = [1,1,2]
Output: 2, nums = [1,2,_]
Explanation: Your function should return k = 2, with the first two elements of nums being 1 and 2 respectively. It does not matter what you leave beyond the returned k (hence they are underscores).
Example 2:
Input: nums = [0,0,1,1,1,2,2,3,3,4]
Output: 5, nums = [0,1,2,3,4,_,_,_,_,_]
Explanation: Your function should return k = 5, with the first five elements of nums being 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4 respectively. It does not matter what you leave beyond the returned k (hence they are underscores).
Constraints:
1 <= nums.length <= 3 * 104
-100 <= nums[i] <= 100
nums
is sorted in non-decreasing order.
Solution
Intuition:
The Intuition is to use two pointers, i
and j
, to iterate through the array. The variable j
is used to keep track of the current index where a unique element should be placed. The initial value of j
is 1 since the first element in the array is always unique and doesn’t need to be changed.
Explanation:
The code starts iterating from i = 1
because we need to compare each element with its previous element to check for duplicates.
The main logic is inside the for
loop:
- If the current element
nums[i]
is not equal to the previous elementnums[i - 1]
, it means we have encountered a new unique element. - In that case, we update
nums[j]
with the value of the unique element atnums[i]
, and then incrementj
by 1 to mark the next position for a new unique element. - By doing this, we effectively overwrite any duplicates in the array and only keep the unique elements.
Once the loop finishes, the value of j
represents the length of the resulting array with duplicates removed.
Finally, we return j
as the desired result.
class Solution {
public:
int removeDuplicates(vector<int>& nums) {
int j = 1;
for(int i = 1; i < nums.size(); i++){
if(nums[i] != nums[i - 1]){
nums[j] = nums[i];
j++;
}
}
return j;
}
};
class Solution {
public int removeDuplicates(int[] nums) {
int j = 1;
for (int i = 1; i < nums.length; i++) {
if (nums[i] != nums[i - 1]) {
nums[j] = nums[i];
j++;
}
}
return j;
}
}
class Solution:
def removeDuplicates(self, nums: List[int]) -> int:
j = 1
for i in range(1, len(nums)):
if nums[i] != nums[i - 1]:
nums[j] = nums[i]
j += 1
return j
Happy Learning – If you require any further information, feel free to contact me.