Squares of a Sorted Array – 977

🔗LC977 🟢 Easy 🧩 Pattern – Arrays and Loops

Given an integer array nums sorted in non-decreasing order, return an array of the squares of each number sorted in non-decreasing order.

Example

Input: nums = [-4,-1,0,3,10]
Output: [0,1,9,16,100]
Explanation: After squaring, the array becomes [16,1,0,9,100].
After sorting, it becomes [0,1,9,16,100].Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Solution

We use two pointers left and right and keep pushing the largest values first to the end of the result array.

/**
 * @param {number[]} nums
 * @return {number[]}
 */
var sortedSquares = function (nums) {
    const n = nums.length;
    let left = 0; // Left pointer
    let right = n - 1; // Right pointer
    const output = new Array(n);
    for (let i = n - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
        const leftValue = nums[left] ** 2;
        const rightValue = nums[right] ** 2;
        if (leftValue > rightValue) {
            output[i] = leftValue;
            left++;
        } else {
            output[i] = rightValue;
            right--;
        }
    }
    return output;
};Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

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