【PAT】A1032 Sharing【链表】

To store English words, one method is to use linked lists and store a word letter by letter. To save some space, we may let the words share the same sublist if they share the same suffix. For example, loading and being are stored as showed in Figure 1.

Figure 1

You are supposed to find the starting position of the common suffix (e.g. the position of i in Figure 1).

Input Specification:

Each input file contains one test case. For each case, the first line contains two addresses of nodes and a positive N (≤10^​5​​ ), where the two addresses are the addresses of the first nodes of the two words, and N is the total number of nodes. The address of a node is a 5-digit positive integer, and NULL is represented by −1.

Then N lines follow, each describes a node in the format:

Address Data Next

whereAddress is the position of the node, Data is the letter contained by this node which is an English letter chosen from { a-z, A-Z }, and Next is the position of the next node.

Output Specification:

For each case, simply output the 5-digit starting position of the common suffix. If the two words have no common suffix, output -1 instead.

Sample Input 1:

11111 22222 9
67890 i 00002
00010 a 12345
00003 g -1
12345 D 67890
00002 n 00003
22222 B 23456
11111 L 00001
23456 e 67890
00001 o 00010

Sample Output 1:

67890

Sample Input 2:

00001 00002 4
00001 a 10001
10001 s -1
00002 a 10002
10002 t -1

Sample Output 2:

-1

题意

给出两条链表，它们在某个结点之后的结点都是公共的，找出第一个公共结点的位置。

思路

我们分析发现，因为在某结点之后两条链表的结点是公共的，所以两条链表的长度之差就是第一个公共结点（也是任意一个公共结点）分别在两条链表上的位置之差。也就是如果第一个公共结点是第一条链表的第i个结点，是第二条链表的第j个结点，i - j = l1-l2。࿰