Suppose we have a list of items called nums, we have to find the smallest index i such that the sum of the numbers which are present at the left of i is equal to the sum of numbers present at right of i. If we cannot find any such solution, return -1.
So, if the input is like nums = [8,2,3,6,5,2,5,9,1,2], then the output will be 4, because sum of elements that are left of index 4 is [8,2,3,6] = 19, and sum of elements that are present at right is [2,5,9,1,2] = 19 also.
To solve this, we will follow these steps −
r := sum of all elements present in nums
l := 0
for each index i and value x in nums, do
r := r - x
if r is same as l, then
return i
l := l + x
return -1
Example
Let us see the following implementation to get better understanding
def solve(nums): r = sum(nums) l = 0 for i,x in enumerate(nums): r -= x if r == l: return i l += x return -1 nums = [8,2,3,6,5,2,5,9,1,2] print(solve(nums))
Input
[8,2,3,6,5,2,5,9,1,2]
Output
4