How to Efficiently Remove Duplicate Values from a Sorted Array in Python While Preserving Order?
I've been banging my head against this for hours... I tried several approaches but none seem to work. I'm working on a Python project where I need to remove duplicate values from a sorted array while keeping the order of the unique elements intact. I've tried using a couple of different methods, but I'm running into performance optimization with larger datasets. My current implementation uses a simple loop with a set to track seen values: ```python def remove_duplicates(arr): seen = set() unique_arr = [] for value in arr: if value not in seen: seen.add(value) unique_arr.append(value) return unique_arr ``` While this works fine for smaller arrays, I noticed that for arrays with a size of over 10,000 elements, it becomes quite slow. I also attempted to use list comprehensions and the `dict.fromkeys()` method, but both approaches also suffered from similar performance problems. The sorted nature of the array should allow me to use a more efficient algorithm, perhaps something that leverages the sorted property to skip over duplicates without checking them all. However, I'm not entirely sure how to implement that efficiently in Python. Are there better alternatives or strategies that would allow me to remove duplicates while ensuring that performance remains optimal, especially as the size of the input increases? Any advice or code snippets would be greatly appreciated! I'm currently using Python 3.9, and I'm looking for solutions that might also scale well should the dataset grow larger in the future. Thanks in advance! My development environment is Linux. Is there a better approach? This issue appeared after updating to Python 3.9. What am I doing wrong?