Binary Search With a Single Loop | Dataford Interview Questions

BestPeers stores candidate record IDs in ascending order for fast lookup. Given a sorted list of integers and a target value, implement binary search using exactly one loop and return the target's index, or -1 if it is absent.

Your implementation must use an iterative approach with a single while or for loop. Do not call a library search function, use recursion, or create another loop through a helper function.

Formal Specification

Implement binary_search(nums, target), where nums is a sorted list of integers in nondecreasing order and target is an integer. Return any valid index i such that nums[i] == target. If the target does not occur, return -1.

Constraints

0 <= len(nums) <= 10^5
-10^9 <= nums[i], target <= 10^9
nums is sorted in nondecreasing order
Duplicate values may occur, and any matching index is valid

Function Signature

def binary_search(nums, target):

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