Grokking the Coding Interview: Patterns for Coding Questions

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Solution: Ceiling of a Number

Problem Statement

Given an array of numbers sorted in an ascending order, find the ceiling of a given number ‘key’. The ceiling of the ‘key’ will be the smallest element in the given array greater than or equal to the ‘key’.

Write a function to return the index of the ceiling of the ‘key’. If there isn’t any ceiling return -1.

Example 1:

Input: [4, 6, 10], key = 6
Output: 1
Explanation: The smallest number greater than or equal to '6' is '6' having index '1'.

Example 2:

Input: [1, 3, 8, 10, 15], key = 12
Output: 4

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I

Ivy

· 4 years ago

Would it be correct in the floor solution to return either end or mid outside the loop? Since integer division "rounds down" so end and mid should always be equivalent by that point.