Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree -- LeetCode

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:如果left为空,则结果是right。若left为非空,而right为空,则结果在left。最后若两者皆不为空,则必定是p和q分别在两个子树里,不然不可能都返回了非NULL,此时直接返回root。
 1 class Solution {
 2 public:
 3     TreeNode* lowestCommonAncestor(TreeNode* root, TreeNode* p, TreeNode* q) {
 4         if (!root || root == p || root == q) return root;
 5         TreeNode *left = lowestCommonAncestor(root->left, p, q);
 6         if (left && left != p && left != q) return left;//answer in left
 7         TreeNode *right = lowestCommonAncestor(root->right, p, q);
 8         if (!left) return right;//left is null, so answer depends on right
 9         else if (!right) return left;//right is null, so answer in left
10         else return root;//both are not null, so root is the answer
11     }
12 };

 

原文地址:https://www.cnblogs.com/fenshen371/p/5168939.html