Floor and Ceil in Sorted Array in DSA C++ - Build from Scratch

Floor and Ceil in Sorted Array

📖 Scenario: You are working on a program that helps users find the closest values in a sorted list of numbers. This is useful in many real-life cases, like finding the nearest available price or closest date.

🎯 Goal: Build a program that finds the floor and ceil of a given number in a sorted array. The floor is the greatest number less than or equal to the target, and the ceil is the smallest number greater than or equal to the target.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a sorted array of integers

Create a target integer to find floor and ceil for

Write logic to find floor and ceil values in the array

Print the floor and ceil values

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Finding floor and ceil values is useful in pricing systems, date/time scheduling, and searching nearest values in sorted data.

💼 Career

Understanding floor and ceil concepts helps in algorithm design and optimization tasks common in software development and data analysis roles.

1

Create the sorted array

Create a sorted array of integers called arr with these exact values: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14

DSA C++

// Create the sorted array called arr
// Your code here

Hint

Use C++ array syntax with exact values in ascending order.

2

Set the target number

Create an integer variable called target and set it to 9

DSA C++

int arr[] = {2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14};
// Create the target variable called target and set it to 9
// Your code here

Hint

Use a simple integer variable assignment.

3

Find floor and ceil values

Write code to find the floor and ceil of target in arr. Use two integer variables called floor and ceil. Initialize floor to -1 and ceil to -1. Use a for loop with variable i from 0 to 6 to check each element in arr. If arr[i] is less than or equal to target, update floor to arr[i]. If arr[i] is greater than or equal to target and ceil is still -1, update ceil to arr[i].

DSA C++

int arr[] = {2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14};
int target = 9;
// Initialize floor and ceil
int floor = -1;
int ceil = -1;
// Use a for loop with i from 0 to 6 to find floor and ceil
// Your code here

Hint

Loop through the array and update floor and ceil based on conditions.

4

Print floor and ceil values

Print the floor and ceil values using std::cout in this exact format: Floor: X and Ceil: Y where X and Y are the values of floor and ceil respectively.

DSA C++

int arr[] = {2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14};
int target = 9;
int floor = -1;
int ceil = -1;
for (int i = 0; i = target && ceil == -1) {
        ceil = arr[i];
    }
}
// Print floor and ceil values
// Your code here

Hint

Use std::cout to print the values with the exact text format.