Moving Elements To The End of an Array

4 min readMar 8, 2021

As I’m studying for technical interviews, I came across a problem that was asking me to move specific elements to the ending of an input array. Since it’s a medium level problem , I thought I’d create a blog post about how I approached the problem. Let’s start.

The Prompt

Given an array of integers and an integer, create a function that moves all the instances of the given integer to the end of the array. Then, return the modified array.

**Note: The order of the integers within the array doesn’t need to be maintained.

The Approach

The way I think about approaching this is similar to many other data structure and algorithm problem, with pointers.

First, I’d create two variables to represent the positions of the array, one for the beginning and another for the last position of the array.

Then, I can create a conditional statement to invoke only when the two pointers aren’t equal. Meaning that the pointer starting from the first position of the array will be before the pointer starting at the ending of the array.

Now to handle an edge case… what if the element at the second pointer (which starts at the end of the array) is already pointing to the integer that needs to be moved to the end? In this case, I’ll simply decrement the second pointer and look at the next number.

Next, what to do when the element at the firs pointer is equal to the integer I need to move to the end? When this happens, I can swap the elements as needed. This is where I’d create a helper function to handle the swapping functionality.

Then, while we’re still in the scope of the initial conditional, increment the first pointer.

Lastly, return the modified array and we should be good. Let’s look at the code now.

The Code

The function will take two parameters, an array and an integer. Any instance of the integer must be moved to the end.

Then let’s make our two pointers, “i” and “j”.

Now we can start on the conditional logic. Let’s use a while loop to invoke whenever “i” is less than “j”. Outside of this while loop, we’ll invoke the final modified array. (The array will be modified within the while loop).

Within the while loop, I can use more conditional logic. First, we need to take care of the edge case where the the element at the index of “j” might be equal to the integer we need to move to the end. If it is, then decrement “j”.

Now after the second while loop, let’s use an if statement to swap elements, this is also where I’ll include aspirational code for a helper method to handle to swapping functionality.

Now within the initial while loop and after the two inner loops (the second while loop and the if statement), let’s increment the “i” pointer. Then let’s get started on the helper function.

The swapping logic will go as the following:

create a temporary variable that will hold the value of the element at index “j”
on the next line, the element at index “j” will be set to the element at index “i”
Then, on the next line, the element at index “i” will be set to the temporary variable we initially created.

Let’s see how this looks.