find the kth smallest number in a list in typescript

To find the kth smallest number in a list in TypeScript, we can sort the list in ascending order and then return the element at the kth index. Here's how it can be done:

index.ts
function findKthSmallestNumber(list: number[], k: number): number {
  // sort the list in ascending order
  list.sort((a, b) => a - b);

  // return the kth smallest number
  return list[k - 1];
}
197 chars
8 lines

In this implementation, we first sort the list in ascending order using the sort() method, which takes a callback function to determine the order of the sort. The callback function returns a negative value if a should come before b, a positive value if a should come after b, and 0 if they are equal.

Once the list is sorted, we can simply return the element at the kth index (which is k - 1 in 0-based indexing).

Note that this implementation modifies the original list in place. If you don't want to modify the original list, you can create a copy of it using the slice() method before sorting.

gistlibby LogSnag