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LeetCode 452, Medium. Topics: Array, Greedy, Sorting. View on LeetCode. Generate this problem as a practice environment: tested reference solution, 15 parametrized pytest cases, and a playground notebook:

Problem

There are some spherical balloons taped onto a flat wall that represents the XY-plane. The balloons are represented as a 2D integer array points where points[i] = [x_start, x_end] denotes a balloon whose horizontal diameter stretches between x_start and x_end. You do not know the exact y-coordinates of the balloons. Arrows can be shot up directly vertically (in the positive y-direction) from different points along the x-axis. A balloon with x_start and x_end is burst by an arrow shot at x if x_start <= x <= x_end. There is no limit to the number of arrows that can be shot. A shot arrow keeps traveling up infinitely, bursting any balloons in its path. Given the array points, return the minimum number of arrows that must be shot to burst all balloons.

Examples

Constraints

  • 1 <= points.length <= 10^5
  • points[i].length == 2
  • -2^31 <= x_start < x_end <= 2^31 - 1

Solution

Reference implementation from solution.py on GitHub, full suite in test_solution.py:

Complexity

Tags

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Last modified on September 7, 2026