Linear search is used on a collections of items. It relies on the technique of traversing a list from start to end by exploring properties of all the elements that are found on the way.
For example, consider an array of integers of size $$N$$. You should find and print the position of all the elements with value $$x$$. Here, the linear search is based on the idea of matching each element from the beginning of the list to the end of the list with the integer $$x$$, and then printing the position of the element if the condition is `True'.
Implementation:
The pseudo code for this example is as follows :
for(start to end of array)
{
if (current_element equals to 5)
{
print (current_index);
}
}
For example, consider the following image:
If you want to determine the positions of the occurrence of the number $$7$$ in this array. To determine the positions, every element in the array from start to end, i.e., from index $$1$$ to index $$10$$ will be compared with number $$7$$, to check which element matches the number $$7$$.
Time Complexity:
The time complexity of the linear search is $$O(N)$$ because each element in an array is compared only once.
