Flatten a Multilevel Doubly Linked List

theabbie

Abhishek Chaudhary

Posted on June 10, 2022

Flatten a Multilevel Doubly Linked List

You are given a doubly linked list, which contains nodes that have a next pointer, a previous pointer, and an additional child pointer. This child pointer may or may not point to a separate doubly linked list, also containing these special nodes. 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.

Given the head of the first level of the list, flatten the list so that all the nodes appear in a single-level, doubly linked list. Let curr be a node with a child list. The nodes in the child list should appear after curr and before curr.next in the flattened list.

Return the head of the flattened list. The nodes in the list must have all of their child pointers set to null.

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 shown.
After flattening the multilevel linked list it becomes:

Example 2:

Input: head = [1,2,null,3]
Output: [1,3,2]
Explanation: The multilevel linked list in the input is shown.
After flattening the multilevel linked list it becomes:

Example 3:

Input: head = []
Output: []
Explanation: There could be empty list in the input.

Constraints:

  • The number of Nodes will not exceed 1000.
  • 1 <= Node.val <= 105

How the multilevel linked list is represented in test cases:

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]

SOLUTION:

"""
# Definition for a Node.
class Node:
    def __init__(self, val, prev, next, child):
        self.val = val
        self.prev = prev
        self.next = next
        self.child = child
"""

class Solution:
    def flatten(self, head: 'Optional[Node]') -> 'Optional[Node]':
        if head:
            curr = head
            while curr:
                tmp = curr.next
                if curr.child:
                    curr.next = self.flatten(curr.child)
                    if curr.next:
                        curr.next.prev = curr
                    curr.child = None
                    ccurr = curr.next
                    while ccurr and ccurr.next:
                        ccurr = ccurr.next
                    ccurr.next = tmp
                    if tmp:
                        tmp.prev = ccurr
                curr = tmp
        return head
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode
💖 💪 🙅 🚩
theabbie
Abhishek Chaudhary

Posted on June 10, 2022

Join Our Newsletter. No Spam, Only the good stuff.

Sign up to receive the latest update from our blog.

Related

Balance a Binary Search Tree
leetcode Balance a Binary Search Tree

June 19, 2022

Implement Stack using Queues
leetcode Implement Stack using Queues

June 16, 2022

Sum of Digits in Base K
leetcode Sum of Digits in Base K

June 16, 2022

Permutation Sequence
leetcode Permutation Sequence

June 16, 2022