Debug a Multi-Bug Snippet | Dataford Interview Questions

Debug a provided code snippet containing roughly 5 bugs/problems and explain the fixes.

Asked in the technical screen stage. The function should merge overlapping or touching intervals and return them sorted by start value.

def merge_intervals(intervals):
    if intervals is None:
        return []
    intervals.sort(key=lambda x: x[1])
    merged = intervals[0]
    for current in intervals[1:]:
        if current[0] < merged[1]:
            merged[1] = current[1]
        else:
            merged += current
    return merged

Contract

Input: a list of [start, end] integer pairs. Output: a new list of merged pairs.

Constraints

0 <= len(intervals) <= 1000
Each interval contains exactly two integers
For every interval, start <= end
The output must be sorted by interval start
The input list must not be modified

Function Signature

def merge_intervals(intervals):

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