What is the time complexity of deleting the last element from a singly linked li
Practice Questions
Q1
What is the time complexity of deleting the last element from a singly linked list?
O(1)
O(n)
O(log n)
O(n^2)
Questions & Step-by-Step Solutions
What is the time complexity of deleting the last element from a singly linked list?
Step 1: Understand what a singly linked list is. It is a data structure where each element (node) points to the next one.
Step 2: Identify the last element in the list. In a singly linked list, you cannot directly access the last element because you only have a reference to the first element (head).
Step 3: To delete the last element, you need to find the second-to-last element. This is because you need to update its pointer to null (or None) to remove the last element.
Step 4: Start from the head of the list and traverse through each node until you reach the second-to-last node. This requires visiting each node one by one.
Step 5: Count the number of nodes you visit. In the worst case, you will visit all n nodes in the list to find the second-to-last node.
Step 6: Since you have to traverse the entire list to delete the last element, the time complexity is O(n).
