Time Needed to Buy Tickets — LeetCode 2073 Python Solution

The problem

There are n people in a line queuing to buy tickets, where the 0th person is at the front of the line and the (n - 1)th person is at the back of the line. You are given a 0-indexed integer array tickets of length n where the number of tickets that the ith person would like to buy is tickets[i].

Python solution

class Solution:
    def timeRequiredToBuy(self, tickets: List[int], k: int) -> int:
        ans = 0
        for i, x in enumerate(tickets):
            ans += min(x, tickets[k] if i <= k else tickets[k] - 1)
        return ans

Complexity

Pattern: Stack

When the most recent unresolved thing is the one that matters, use a stack. LeetCode 2073. Time Needed to Buy Tickets is filed here because LeetCode tags it Queue, which is the vocabulary this hub collects.

The stack guide has the Python template for the pattern and the 194 LeetCode problems that use it.

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