Arrays Linked Lists Questions Long
The time complexity of deleting an element from a specific position in a linked list is O(n), where n is the number of elements in the linked list.
To delete an element from a specific position in a linked list, we need to traverse the list to find the desired position. This traversal takes O(n) time as we may need to visit each node in the worst case scenario.
Once we reach the desired position, we can delete the element by adjusting the pointers of the previous and next nodes accordingly. This deletion operation takes constant time, O(1), as it only involves updating a few pointers.
However, the overall time complexity is still O(n) because the traversal time dominates the deletion time. In the worst case, we may need to traverse the entire linked list to find the desired position, resulting in a linear time complexity.
It is worth noting that if we have a reference to the node to be deleted, the deletion operation can be performed in O(1) time by simply adjusting the pointers of the previous and next nodes. However, if we only have the position and not the reference to the node, we need to traverse the list to find the node, resulting in O(n) time complexity.