Saturday, May 26, 2007

Write a C program to remove duplicates from a sorted linked list.

As the linked list is sorted, we can start from the beginning of the list and compare adjacent nodes. When adjacent nodes are the same, remove the second one. There's a tricky case where the node after the next node needs to be noted before the deletion.


// Remove duplicates from a sorted list
void RemoveDuplicates(struct node* head)
{
struct node* current = head;
if (current == NULL) return; // do nothing if the list is empty

// Compare current node with next node
while(current->next!=NULL)
{
if (current->data == current->next->data)
{
struct node* nextNext = current->next->next;
free(current->next);
current->next = nextNext;
}
else
{
current = current->next; // only advance if no deletion
}
}
}

6 comments:

Ayman said...

Any other solution in O(n) time complexity ?

varma said...

this will work only for the list 1 2 3 3 4 5 like this but it wont work if the duplicate elements r not consecutive like 1 2 3 2 2

Ravi said...

@manikanta: check the title once. It is remove duplicates from "sorted" linked list

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Will it work if its 1 2 2 2 2 2 4 6 8 ?