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26. Remove Duplicates from Sorted Array - Java

Question : Given a sorted array nums, remove the duplicates in-place such that each element appears only once and returns the new length.

Do not allocate extra space for another array, you must do this by modifying the input array in-place with O(1) extra memory.

public int removeDuplicates(int[] nums) {
if (nums.length == 0) return 0;
int i = 0;
for (int j = 1; j < nums.length; j++) {
    if (nums[j] != nums[i]) {
        i++;
        nums[i] = nums[j];
    }
}
return i + 1;

}

What exactly does the return statement do here. What does return i + 1 mean here ?

Solution

  • The return i + 1 is returning how many unique integers are there. I believe this is a Leetcode problem, and since its in place, the int[] is passed in by reference, Leetcode wants to know how many numbers to check (you're supposed to put the unique numbers in the first i + 1 spots).

    If you look at the question, it says: enter image description here Which means that you return the length of the array.

    So, if you have the array [1,1,2,3,4,4], you would turn that into [1,2,3,4,...], where the ... is the rest of the array. However, you return 4 because the length of the new array should be 4.

    Hope this clears things up for you!