17. Letter Combinations of a Phone Number

Given a digit string, return all possible letter combinations that the number could represent.

A mapping of digit to letters (just like on the telephone buttons) is given below.

Input:Digit string "23"
Output: ["ad", "ae", "af", "bd", "be", "bf", "cd", "ce", "cf"].

Note:
Although the above answer is in lexicographical order, your answer could be in any order you want.

采用回溯的方法，遍历每一个数字对应的字母，相当于找到所有的排列组合，代码如下：

public class Solution {
    String[] strs = {"", "", "abc", "def", "ghi", "jkl", "mno", "pqrs", "tuv", "wxyz"};
    public List<String> letterCombinations(String digits) {
        List<String> res = new ArrayList<String>();
        if (digits == null || digits.length() == 0) {
            return res;
        }
        for(char ch: digits.toCharArray()) {
            int digit = ch - '0';
            if (digit < 2 || digit > 9) {
                return res;
            }
        }
        helper(digits, res, new StringBuilder(), 0);
        return res;
    }
    private void helper(String digits, List<String> list, StringBuilder sb, int index) {
        if (index == digits.length()) {
            list.add(sb.toString());
            return;
        }
        String chs = strs[digits.charAt(index) - '0'];
        for (int i = 0; i < chs.length(); i ++) {
            sb.append(chs.charAt(i));
            helper(digits, list, sb, index + 1);
            sb.deleteCharAt(sb.length() - 1);
        }
    }
}

也可以采用FIFO的思路先进先出，每出来一个，加上下个数字的每一个字母，再存进去。代码如下：

public List<String> letterCombinations(String digits) {
    LinkedList<String> ans = new LinkedList<String>();
    String[] mapping = new String[] {"0", "1", "abc", "def", "ghi", "jkl", "mno", "pqrs", "tuv", "wxyz"};
    ans.add("");
    for(int i =0; i<digits.length();i++){
        int x = Character.getNumericValue(digits.charAt(i));
        while(ans.peek().length()==i){
            String t = ans.remove();
            for(char s : mapping[x].toCharArray())
                ans.add(t+s);
        }
    }
    return ans;
}