Minimum Distance Between Two Elements in an Array | Code Samurai

Minimum Distance Between Two Elements in an Array | Code Samurai

Minimum Distance Between Two Elements in an Array

Question: given an array and two elements, find the minimum distance between the elements in the array. The array may have duplicates. For example, if the array is (2, 1, 3, 4, 0, 2, 5) and the two elements are 4 and 5, then the min distance is 3 because 4 is at index 3 and 5 is at index 6.

Solution: this problem can be solved using two index trackers. The idea is to loop through the array and keep track of the indices of elements that have the same values with the inputs. At the same time, calculate the distance between those two indices and keep the smallest distance.

This solution works great because it doesn't compare all possible distances of inputs when there are duplicates in the array. A naive solution would be computing all different distances between elements that have the same values with the inputs and then return the smallest distance. Here is the implementation in JavaScript:

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