Merge Intervals | Dataford Interview Questions

Merge intervals (LeetCode 56).

Asked in the Round 1 (DSA, HackerRank) stage. It was the only coding problem in a round otherwise focused on Java and DB theory.

Contract

Given intervals, a list of [start, end] integer pairs, return a new list containing all overlapping intervals merged. Sort the result by start time. Intervals that touch, such as [1, 4] and [4, 5], should be merged.

Constraints

0 <= len(intervals) <= 1000
Each interval has exactly two integer endpoints
For every interval, start <= end
The returned intervals must be sorted by start time

Function Signature

def merge(intervals):

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Problem