Question

Let’s say I have an array a of length n and a second array indices, also of length n. indices contains some arbitrary permutation of the sequence [0, n). I want to to rearrange a such that it’s in the order specified by indices. For example, using D syntax:

auto a = [8, 6, 7, 5, 3, 0, 9];
auto indices = [3, 6, 2, 4, 0, 1, 5];
reindexInPlace(a, indices);
assert(a == [5, 9, 7, 3, 8, 6, 0]);

Can this be done in both O(1) space and O(n) time, preferably without mutating indices?

Answer 1

With mutating indices :(. Without looks hard (see stable in-place mergesort).

a = [8, 6, 7, 5, 3, 0, 9]
indices = [3, 6, 2, 4, 0, 1, 5]

for i in xrange(len(a)):
    x = a[i]
    j = i
    while True:
        k = indices[j]
        indices[j] = j
        if k == i:
            break
        a[j] = a[k]
        j = k
    a[j] = x

print a