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Find Odd Occurring Element

Explore how to identify the element that appears an odd number of times in an array by applying the bitwise XOR operator. Understand XOR properties and how they enable you to solve this problem in O(n) time with constant space, enhancing your algorithmic problem-solving skills.

Introduction

In this question, every element appears an even number of times except for one element, which appears an odd number of times. The element that appears an odd number of times is our answer.

Let’s see how to achieve this using the XOR operator.

Problem statement

We need to write a program to find the element, which is repeated odd number of times.

Input: {4, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 3, 5}
 
Output: 3

Concepts

If we take XOR of zero and a ...