Merge Appointment Time Slots | Dataford Interview Questions

Given a list of patient appointment schedules, merge overlapping time slots to find the total busy time for a clinic.

Represent each appointment as a two-element list [start, end], using half-open intervals where start < end. Return the total number of time units covered by at least one appointment. Return 0 for an empty list.

Examples: [[1, 4], [3, 6], [8, 10]] returns 7; [[2, 5], [5, 8]] returns 6.

Function: def total_busy_time(appointments):

Constraints

0 <= appointments.length <= 500
Each appointment has exactly two integers, start and end
0 <= start < end <= 10^9
Appointments may be unsorted
Intervals that touch may be merged without changing the total duration

Function Signature

def total_busy_time(appointments):

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