Fix binary search to return leftmost occurrence for duplicates #13891
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Overview
This PR fixes issue #13887 by modifying the binary search implementation to return the index of the leftmost occurrence when there are multiple occurrences of the search item in the sorted collection. Previously, the function would return any arbitrary occurrence.
Checklist
Proof
The changes include:
binary_searchfunction to continue searching to the left after finding a match to locate the leftmost occurrencebinary_search_by_recursionfunction with an inner helper function that properly handles finding the leftmost occurrencebinary_search([1, 2, 4, 4, 4, 6, 7], 4)which should return2(the index of the leftmost occurrence of4)Closes #13887