DFS Java solution to flatten a multilevel doubly linked list. beats 100% of submissions. 0ms runtime.
Instructions:
You are given a doubly linked list which in addition to the next and previous pointers, it could have a child pointer, which may or may not point to a separate doubly linked list. These child lists may have one or more children of their own, and so on, to produce a multilevel data structure, as shown in the example below.
Flatten the list so that all the nodes appear in a single-level, doubly linked list. You are given the head of the first level of the list.
Example 1:
Input: head = [1,2,3,4,5,6,null,null,null,7,8,9,10,null,null,11,12] Output: [1,2,3,7,8,11,12,9,10,4,5,6] Explanation:
The multilevel linked list in the input is as follows:
After flattening the multilevel linked list it becomes:
Example 2:
Input: head = [1,2,null,3] Output: [1,3,2] Explanation:
The input multilevel linked list is as follows:
1---2---NULL | 3---NULL Example 3:
Input: head = [] Output: []
How multilevel linked list is represented in test case:
We use the multilevel linked list from Example 1 above:
1---2---3---4---5---6--NULL | 7---8---9---10--NULL | 11--12--NULL The serialization of each level is as follows:
[1,2,3,4,5,6,null] [7,8,9,10,null] [11,12,null] To serialize all levels together we will add nulls in each level to signify no node connects to the upper node of the previous level. The serialization becomes:
[1,2,3,4,5,6,null] [null,null,7,8,9,10,null] [null,11,12,null] Merging the serialization of each level and removing trailing nulls we obtain:
[1,2,3,4,5,6,null,null,null,7,8,9,10,null,null,11,12]
Link to question: https://leetcode.com/problems/flatten-a-multilevel-doubly-linked-list/