Leetcode 236. Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree

236. Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree

Total Accepted: 47687 Total Submissions: 165435 Difficulty: Medium

Given a binary tree, find the lowest common ancestor (LCA) of two given nodes in the tree.

According to the definition of LCA on Wikipedia: “The lowest common ancestor is defined between two nodes v and w as the lowest node in T that has both v and w as descendants (where we allow a node to be a descendant of itself).”

        _______3______
       /              
    ___5__          ___1__
   /              /      
   6      _2       0       8
         /  
         7   4

For example, the lowest common ancestor (LCA) of nodes 5 and 1 is 3. Another example is LCA of nodes 5 and 4 is 5, since a node can be a descendant of itself according to the LCA definition.

思路：递归，定义lowestCommonAncestor函数返回值情况。

代码：

/**
 * Definition for a binary tree node.
 * struct TreeNode {
 *     int val;
 *     TreeNode *left;
 *     TreeNode *right;
 *     TreeNode(int x) : val(x), left(NULL), right(NULL) {}
 * };
 */
class Solution {
public:
    TreeNode* lowestCommonAncestor(TreeNode* root, TreeNode* p, TreeNode* q) {
        //指针就是一个存放内存地址的变量，所以只要2个指针存放的内存地址相同，则可以说这2个指针相同
        if(!root||root==p||root==q) return root;
        TreeNode* left=lowestCommonAncestor(root->left,p,q);
        TreeNode* right=lowestCommonAncestor(root->right,p,q);
        /*if(!left&&!right){
            return NULL;
        }
        if(!left) return right;
        if(!right) return left;
        return root;*/
        return !left?right:(!right?left:root);
    }
};