Find the "Kth" max and min element of an array

Find the "Kth" max and min element of an array

Finding Kth smallest or largest element of an array has many intuitive solutions. But in this article, we will only cover the simple array-based approach as this series is dedicated to solving the array section of DSA450. We will probably revisit this or a similar problem in the sorting and searching section.

The easiest approach to finding the kth maximum or minimum element would be to sort the array and return the element at k-1 th index(for minimum) and n-k th index(for maximum).

Here is a quick code snippet for this approach.

function k_min_max_ele(arr, k) {
  arr.sort();
  // [-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7]

  return {
    minimum: arr[k - 1],
    maximum: arr[arr.length - k],
  };
}
console.log(k_min_max_ele([1, 3, 2, 4, 5, -1, 0, 7], 3));
-> { minimum: 1, maximum: 4 }

As we can see, 1 is the 3rd smallest element and 4 is the 3rd largest element of this array.

That is it for this post! Next, we will sort an array of 0s, 1s and 2s.