Search in an Array | Dataford Interview Questions

Allscripts Sunrise Clinical Manager may provide application data as an array of identifiers, such as encounter or order codes. Given an unsorted array and a target value, return the index of the target's first occurrence, or -1 if it is not present.

Formal Specification

Implement search_element(arr, target).

arr is a list of integers.
target is an integer to locate.
Return an integer index in the range 0 through len(arr) - 1 for the first matching element.
Return -1 when no element equals target.
The input array is not guaranteed to be sorted, and duplicate values are allowed.

Constraints

0 <= len(arr) <= 10^5
-10^9 <= arr[i], target <= 10^9
The array may be empty
Duplicate values are allowed
The array is not guaranteed to be sorted

Function Signature

def search_element(arr, target):

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