Manipulating array's values in a certain way - c++

Question

So I was asked to write a function that changes array's values in a way that:
All of the values that are the smallest aren't changed
if, let's assume, the smallest number is 2 and there is no 3's and 4's then all 5's are changed for 3's etc.
for example, for an array = [2, 5, 7, 5] we would get [2, 3, 4, 3], which generalizes to getting a minimal value of an array which remains unchanged, and every other minimum (not including the first one) is changed depending on which minimum it is. On our example - 5 is the first minimum (besides 2), so it is 2 (first minimum) + 1 = 3, 7 is 2nd smallest after 2, so it is 2+2(as it is 2nd smallest).
I've come up with something like this:
int fillGaps(int arr[], size_t sz){
int min = *min_element(arr, arr+sz);
int w = 1;
for (int i = 0; i<sz; i++){
if (arr[i] == min) {continue;}
else{
int mini = *min_element(arr+i, arr+sz);
for (int j = 0; j<sz; j++){
if (arr[j] == mini){arr[j] = min+w;}
}
w++;}
}
return arr[sz-1];
}
However it works fine only for the 0th and 1st value, it doesnt affect any further items. Could anyone please help me with that?

Answer 1

I don't quite follow the logic of your function, so can't quite comment on that.
Here's how I interpret what needs to be done. Note that my example implementation is written to be as understandable as possible. There might be ways to make it faster.
Note that I'm also using an std::vector, to make things more readable and C++-like. You really shouldn't be passing raw pointers and sizes, that's super error prone. At the very least bundle them in a struct.
#include <algorithm>
#include <set>
#include <unordered_map>
#include <vector>
int fillGaps (std::vector<int> & data) {
// Make sure we don't have to worry about edge cases in the code below.
if (data.empty()) { return 0; }
/* The minimum number of times we need to loop over the data is two.
* First to check which values are in there, which lets us decide
* what each original value should be replaced with. Second to do the
* actual replacing.
*
* So let's trade some memory for speed and start by creating a lookup table.
* Each entry will map an existing value to its new value. Let's use the
* "define lambda and immediately invoke it" to make the scope of variables
* used to calculate all this as small as possible.
*/
auto const valueMapping = [&data] {
// Use an std::set so we get all unique values in sorted order.
std::set<int> values;
for (int e : data) { values.insert(e); }
std::unordered_map<int, int> result;
result.reserve(values.size());
// Map minimum value to itself, and increase replacement value by one for
// each subsequent value present in the data vector.
int replacement = *values.begin();
for (auto e : values) { result.emplace(e, replacement++); }
return result;
}();
// Now the actual algorithm is trivial: loop over the data and replace each
// element with its replacement value.
for (auto & e : data) { e = valueMapping.at(e); }
return data.back();
}