Single Element in Sorted Pairs | Dataford Interview Questions

You are given a sorted array consisting of only integers where every element appears exactly twice, except for one element which appears exactly once. Return the single element that appears.

Asked in the technical phone screen stage. Time and space complexity were discussed.

Contract

Implement single_non_duplicate(nums), accepting a sorted list of integers and returning the unique integer.

Constraints

1 <= len(nums) <= 10^4
nums is sorted in nondecreasing order
len(nums) is odd
Exactly one integer appears once
Every other integer appears exactly twice
-10^9 <= nums[i] <= 10^9

Function Signature

def single_non_duplicate(nums):

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Problem