Mahdi Shamlou | Solving LeetCode #4: Median of Two Sorted Arrays — My First Attempt

#algorithms #tutorial #interview #leetcode

Hey everyone! Mahdi Shamlou here — continuing my LeetCode classic problems series.

After [Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters], today we’re looking at Problem #4 — Median of Two Sorted Arrays — one of the famous hard ones!

Problem Statement

Given two sorted arrays nums1 and nums2 of size m and n respectively, return the median of the two sorted arrays.

Examples:

Input: nums1 = [1,3], nums2 = [2]
Output: 2.00000
Explanation: merged array = [1,2,3] and median is 2.0
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Input: nums1 = [1,2], nums2 = [3,4]
Output: 2.50000
Explanation: merged array = [1,2,3,4] and median is (2 + 3) / 2 = 2.5
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Input: nums1 = [], nums2 = [2,3]
Output: 2.50000

My first intuitive solution (the fun & lazy way I tried) This is exactly what came to my mind when I first saw it — just throw everything together:

class Solution:
    def findMedianSortedArrays(self, nums1, nums2):
        list3 = nums1 + nums2           # just combine them
        list3 = sorted(list3)           # sort everything
        mid = len(list3) / 2

        print(list3)                    # I even printed to see what happens 😂
        print(f'mid is {mid}')

        if len(list3) % 2 == 0:         # even number of elements
            return (list3[int(mid)] + list3[int(mid)-1]) / 2
        else:                           # odd
            return list3[int(mid)]

It works, it’s super readable, and honestly — for small inputs — it feels very satisfying to write 😄

My repo (all solutions are here): GitHub — mahdi0shamlou/LeetCode: Solve LeetCode Problems

What about you? How did you first approach this problem? Did you also just merge + sort at the beginning like me? 😅 Or did you go straight to something else?

And honestly… after finally getting this naive version to pass all test cases, I just sat back, laughed at how simple (yet not-so-efficient) it was, and felt that sweet mix of relief and “I did it!” energy 😂 Here’s me right after hitting “Submit”: