Binary Search---Classical Binary Search

Given a target integer T and an integer array A sorted in ascending order, find the index i such that A[i] == T or return -1 if there is no such index.

Assumptions

• There can be duplicate elements in the array, and you can return any of the indices i such that A[i] == T.

Examples

• A = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5}, T = 3, return 2
• A = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5}, T = 6, return -1
• A = {1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4}, T = 2, return 1 or 2 or 3

Corner Cases

• What if A is null or A is of zero length? We should return -1 in this case.

  def binarySearch(self, array, target):
      if not array: 
        return -1
      left = 0
      right = len(array) - 1
      while left <= right:
        mid = (left + right) // 2 
        if array[mid] > target:
          right = mid - 1
        elif array[mid] < target:
          left = mid + 1
        else:
          return mid
      return -1