Hi, here’s your problem today. This problem was recently asked by Apple:

Given a sorted list of size n, with m unique elements (thus m < n), modify the list such that the first m unique elements in the list will be sorted, ignoring the rest of the list. Your solution should have a space complexity of O(1). Instead of returning the list (since you are just modifying the original list), you should return what m is.

Here’s an example and some starter code.

def remove_dups(nums):

Fill this in.

nums = [1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 9] print(remove_dups(nums))

8

print(nums)

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9]

nums = [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1] print(remove_dups(nums)) print(nums)

1

[1]