You are given a 0-indexed 2D integer array nums representing the coordinates of the cars parking on a number line. For any index i, nums[i] = [starti, endi] where starti is the starting point of the ith car and endi is the ending point of the ith car.
Return the number of integer points on the line that are covered with any part of a car.
Example 1:
Input: nums = [[3,6],[1,5],[4,7]]
Output: 7
Explanation: All the points from 1 to 7 intersect at least one car, therefore the answer would be 7.
Example 2:
Input: nums = [[1,3],[5,8]]
Output: 7
Explanation: Points intersecting at least one car are 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8. There are a total of 7 points, therefore the answer would be 7.
Constraints:
1 <= nums.length <= 100
nums[i].length == 2
1 <= starti <= endi <= 100
Solutions
Solution 1: Difference Array
According to the problem description, we need to add one vehicle to each interval $[\textit{start}_i, \textit{end}_i]$. We can use a difference array to achieve this.
We define an array $d$ of length 102. For each interval $[\textit{start}_i, \textit{end}_i]$, we increment $d[\textit{start}_i]$ by 1 and decrement $d[\textit{end}_i + 1]$ by 1.
Finally, we perform a prefix sum operation on $d$ and count the number of elements in the prefix sum that are greater than 0.
The time complexity is $O(n + m)$, and the space complexity is $O(m)$, where $n$ is the length of the given array, and $m$ is the maximum value in the array. In this problem, $m \leq 102$.
If the range of intervals in the problem is large, we can use a hash table to store the start and end points of the intervals. Then, we sort the keys of the hash table and perform prefix sum statistics.
The time complexity is $O(n \times \log n)$, and the space complexity is $O(n)$. Here, $n$ is the length of the given array.