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Quickly merging two sorted arrays using std::merge() in C++ STL

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C++ program to merge two sorted arrays of length ‘n’ and ‘m’ respectively in sorted order. Examples:

Input: A[] = {3, 6, 9}
       B[] = {2, 7, 11}
Output: C[] = {2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 11}

Input: A[] = {1, 1, 3, 6, 9}
       B[] = {1, 2, 7, 11, 11}
Output: C[] = {1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 11, 11}

We have discussed other approaches in below posts Merge two sorted arrays with O(1) extra space Merge two sorted arrays We can quickly merge two sorted arrays using std::merge present algorithm header file. Below is the implementation using std :: merge 

CPP




// C++ program to merge two sorted arrays
// std::merge()
#include <iostream>
#include <algorithm>
using namespace std;
 
// Driver code
int main()
{
    int A[] = {1, 1, 9};
    int n = sizeof(A)/sizeof(A[0]);
 
    int B[] = {2, 7, 11, 11};
    int m  = sizeof(B)/sizeof(B[0]);
 
    // Merging in sorted order
    int C[m + n];
    merge(A, (A + n), B, (B + m), C);
 
    // Print the merged array.
    for (int i = 0; i < (m + n); i++)
        cout << C[i] << " ";
 
    return 0;
}


Output:

1 1 2 7 9 11 11 

Time Complexity: The time complexity of this algorithm is O(n + m), where n and m are the sizes of the two arrays.

Space Complexity: The space complexity of this algorithm is O(n + m), where n and m are the sizes of the two arrays. This is because we need to create a new array to store the merged elements, which takes O(n + m) space.

In general, syntax of merge() is

// Merges elements from aFirst to aLast and bFirst
// to bLast into a result and returns iterator pointing
// to first element of result
OutputItr merge(InputItr1 aFirst, InputItr1 aLast,
                InputItr2 bFirst, InputItr2 bLast,
                OutputItr result);

We can use it for array of user defined objects
also by overloading < operator.


Last Updated : 14 Feb, 2023
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