Software Coding Exercises | Dataford Interview Questions

Tell me about a time you worked through short software coding exercises and what you focused on to produce correct, maintainable code.

For the hands-on exercise, implement a function that merges overlapping intervals. Return the merged intervals sorted by start time, handling unsorted input, nested intervals, and intervals that touch.

Input: a list of [start, end] pairs. Output: a merged list of pairs.

Examples: [ [1,3], [2,6] ] returns [[1,6]]; [ [1,2], [3,4] ] returns [[1,2],[3,4]].

Constraints: 0 <= len(intervals) <= 5000, and start <= end.

Constraints

0 <= len(intervals) <= 5000
Each interval has exactly two integers
For every interval, start <= end
Return intervals sorted by start time
Intervals that touch, such as [1, 2] and [2, 4], are merged

Function Signature

def merge_intervals(intervals):

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