Section 1Understand Problem
Section 01
Understand the problem
Restate the problem precisely. Interviewers reward candidates who pause, define the contract, and name the guarantees before coding.
Problem statement
Given an array of intervals where `intervals[i] = [start_i, end_i]`, merge all overlapping intervals and return an array of the non-overlapping intervals that cover all the intervals in the input. Output must be sorted by interval start.
Example
intervals = [[1,3],[2,6],[8,10],[15,18]] → [[1,6],[8,10],[15,18]]
Constraints
1 ≤ intervals.length ≤ 10⁴ · intervals[i].length == 2 · 0 ≤ start_i ≤ end_i ≤ 10⁴
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