LeetCode 1985, Medium. Topics: Array, String, Divide and Conquer, Sorting, Heap (Priority Queue), Quickselect. View on LeetCode.
Generate this problem as a practice environment: tested reference solution, 18 parametrized pytest cases, and a playground notebook:
Problem
You are given an array of strings nums and an integer k. Each string in nums represents an integer without leading zeros.
Return the string that represents the kth largest integer in nums.
Note: Duplicate numbers should be counted distinctly. For example, if nums is ["1","2","2"], "2" is the first largest integer, "2" is the second-largest integer, and "1" is the third-largest integer.
Examples
Constraints
- 1 <= k <= nums.length <= 10^4
- 1 <= nums[i].length <= 100
- nums[i] consists of only digits.
- nums[i] will not have any leading zeros.
Solution
Reference implementation from solution.py on GitHub, full suite in test_solution.py:
Complexity
NeetCode All. Last modified on September 7, 2026