Intersection of two linked lists
Given the heads of two singly linked-lists headA and headB, return the node at which the two lists intersect. If the two linked lists have no intersection at all, return null.
class Solution:
# @param two ListNodes
# @return the intersected ListNode
def getIntersectionNode(self, headA, headB):
if headA is None or headB is None:
return None
pa = headA # 2 pointers
pb = headB
while pa is not pb:
# if either pointer hits the end, switch head and continue the second traversal,
# if not hit the end, just move on to next
pa = headB if pa is None else pa.next
pb = headA if pb is None else pb.next
return pa # only 2 ways to get out of the loop, they meet or the both hit the end=None
# the idea is if you switch head, the possible difference between length would be countered.
# On the second traversal, they either hit or miss.
# if they meet, pa or pb would be the node we are looking for,
# if they didn't meet, they will hit the end at the same iteration, pa == pb == None, return either one of them is the same,None
public ListNode getIntersectionNode(ListNode headA, ListNode headB) {
//boundary check
if(headA == null || headB == null) return null;
ListNode a = headA;
ListNode b = headB;
//if a & b have different len, then we will stop the loop after second iteration
while( a != b){
//for the end of first iteration, we just reset the pointer to the head of another linkedlist
a = a == null? headB : a.next;
b = b == null? headA : b.next;
}
return a;
}
Related Problems
You are given the heads of two sorted linked lists list1 and list2.
Merge the two lists into one sorted list. The list should be made by splicing together the nodes of the first two lists.
Return the head of the merged linked list.
Given the root of a binary tree, flatten the tree into a "linked list":
The "linked list" should use the same TreeNode class where the right child pointer points to the next node in the list and the left child pointer is always null.
The "linked list" should be in the same order as a pre-order traversal of the binary tree.
Given an integer array nums where the elements are sorted in ascending order, convert it to a height-balanced binary search tree.
Given the head of a linked list and a value x, partition it such that all nodes less than x come before nodes greater than or equal to x.
You should preserve the original relative order of the nodes in each of the two partitions.