Merge Lists With Odd Logic | Dataford Interview Questions

The's ranking pipeline receives two ordered lists of scores. Filter out every even value, then select and merge odd values from both lists to create the lexicographically largest sequence of exactly k values.

The relative order of selected values from each original list must remain unchanged, but values from the two lists may be interleaved. Use a monotonic-stack technique to choose the best subsequence from each list, then merge those subsequences greedily.

Formal Specification

Implement max_odd_merge(nums1, nums2, k).

Input: Two lists of integers, nums1 and nums2, and an integer k.
Output: A list containing exactly k odd integers, maximized in lexicographic order.
If two candidate sequences share a prefix, the sequence with the larger first differing value is preferred.

Constraints

0 <= len(nums1), len(nums2) <= 10^4
1 <= k <= total number of odd values
-10^9 <= nums1[i], nums2[i] <= 10^9
At least k odd values exist across both lists

Function Signature

def max_odd_merge(nums1, nums2, k):

Your question is Merge Lists With Odd Logic. Start with the requirements in the Question tab.

Run and submit as often as you like. When you're ready, talk me through your approach or go straight to the code.

Problem