Intuition

We need to rearrange nums so that all elements less than pivot come first, all elements equal to pivot come in the middle, and all elements greater than pivot come last — while preserving the relative order of the less-than and greater-than groups.

The key observation is that the smaller elements should be filled from the front of the answer and the greater elements should be filled from the back. Whatever gap is left in the middle must be filled with pivot values.

Approach (Two pointers)

• Allocate an answer array ans of the same length n.
• Keep a left pointer starting at 0 (next free slot from the front) and a right pointer starting at n - 1 (next free slot from the back).
• Scan with two indices simultaneously: i moving forward and j moving backward.
• When nums[i] < pivot, place it at ans[left] and advance left. Because we scan i left-to-right, the less-than group keeps its original order.
• When nums[j] > pivot, place it at ans[right] and decrement right. Because we scan j right-to-left while writing from the back, the greater-than group also keeps its original order.
• After the scan, every slot in [left, right] belongs to elements equal to the pivot, so fill that range with pivot.

Complexity

Time Complexity: O(N) where N is the number of elements in nums. We make a single combined pass to place the non-pivot elements and one pass to fill the pivot values.

Space Complexity: O(1) extra space, excluding the O(N) output array that we must return.

Code

Go

func pivotArray(nums []int, pivot int) []int {
    n := len(nums)
    left, right := 0, n - 1
    ans := make([]int, n)
    for i, j := 0, n - 1; i < n; i, j = i + 1, j - 1 {
        if nums[i] < pivot {
            ans[left] = nums[i]
            left++
        }
        if nums[j] > pivot {
            ans[right] = nums[j]
            right--
        }
    }
    for left <= right {
        ans[left] = pivot
        left++
    }
    return ans
}

Rust

impl Solution {
    pub fn pivot_array(nums: Vec<i32>, pivot: i32) -> Vec<i32> {
        let n = nums.len();
        let (mut left, mut right) = (0, n - 1);
        let mut ans = vec![0; n];
        for i in 0..n {
            let j = n - i - 1;
            if nums[i] < pivot {
                ans[left] = nums[i];
                left += 1;
            }
            if nums[j] > pivot {
                ans[right] = nums[j];
                if right > 0 {
                    right -= 1;
                }
            }
        }
        for i in left..=right {
            ans[i] = pivot;
        }
        ans
    }
}