This is a premium problem. We're working on making it available for free soon.
Explore Free ProblemsSolutions for this premium problem will be available for free soon.
Browse Free ProblemsWatch expert explanations and walkthroughs
Practice problems asked by these companies to ace your technical interviews.
Explore More ProblemsJot down your thoughts, approach, and key learnings
Yes, Missing Ranges or similar gap-detection problems appear in technical interviews at large tech companies. They test a candidate’s ability to reason about edge cases, ranges, and efficient single-pass array traversal.
The optimal approach is to iterate through the sorted array and detect gaps between consecutive numbers. If the difference between two values is greater than one, a missing range exists between them. This method works in a single pass with constant extra space.
An array traversal technique is sufficient for this problem because the input is already sorted. You only need simple variables to track the previous boundary and detect gaps, so no advanced data structures are required.
Important edge cases include an empty array, missing numbers at the beginning or end of the range, and cases where no numbers are missing. Handling the boundaries between lower and upper correctly is essential.