986. Interval List Intersections

Given two lists of closed intervals, each list of intervals is pairwise disjoint and in sorted order.

Return the intersection of these two interval lists.

(Formally, a closed interval [a, b] (with a <= b) denotes the set of real numbers x with a <= x <= b. The intersection of two closed intervals is a set of real numbers that is either empty, or can be represented as a closed interval. For example, the intersection of [1, 3] and [2, 4] is [2, 3].)

Example 1:

Input: A = [[0,2],[5,10],[13,23],[24,25]], B = [[1,5],[8,12],[15,24],[25,26]]
Output: [[1,2],[5,5],[8,10],[15,23],[24,24],[25,25]]
Reminder: The inputs and the desired output are lists of Interval objects, and not arrays or lists.

Note:

1. 0 <= A.length < 1000
2. 0 <= B.length < 1000
3. 0 <= A[i].start, A[i].end, B[i].start, B[i].end < 10^9

NOTE: input types have been changed on April 15, 2019. Please reset to default code definition to get new method signature.

方法1: two pointers

思路：

解题点在于，题目中规定了A 和 B 各自内部是由pairwise disjoint intervals 组成的。而对于一个interval A[0].end 来讲，at most 1 interval in B can intersect it。否则如果b1, b2两个区间同时intersect A[0].end, 则b1, b2会重叠。所以只要找到了和 A[0]相交的区间，之后A[0]就不用考虑了。也就是说用两个指针，每一次计算两个指向区间的重叠，如果有重叠就放进结果。这两个区间中，我们要去掉end被intersect的区间，而这个区间必定是end比较早的那个。所以计算重叠之后将end较早的指针向前移动。

Complexity

Time complexity: O(n)
Space complexity: O(1)

class Solution {
public:
    vector<vector<int>> intervalIntersection(vector<vector<int>>& A, vector<vector<int>>& B) {
        vector<vector<int>> result;
        int i = 0, j = 0;
        while (i < A.size() && j < B.size()) {
            int low = max(A[i][0], B[j][0]);
            int high = min(A[i][1], B[j][1]);
            if (low <= high) {
                result.push_back({low, high});
            }
            
            if (A[i][1] < B[j][1]) i++;
            else j++;
        }
        return result;
    }
};