Question

i have tried this problem for quite some time but cannot find a good solution :

suppose we have ranges of integers like

 100 - 1000
 200 - 300
 500 - 600
 550 - 575
 800 - 1200
 1100 - 2300

so i want to get these intermixing ranges into each separate distinct range

 100 - 199
 200 - 300
 301 - 499
 500 - 549
 550 - 575
 575 - 600
 800 - 1099
 1100 - 1200
 1201 - 2300

is there some standard algorithm for this ?

thanks

Answer 1

Shove every number into a single array, sort and dedupe. In C++, inserting them all into a std::set<int> has the desired effect. In Python, you can write sorted(set(x for (a, b) in ranges for x in (a, b))).

In the resulting collection, adjacent pairs represent non-overlapping ranges.

It’s important to note that this technique relies on the [a, b) convention (i.e., inclusive on the left; exclusive on the right) for describing ranges.