Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Search Tree

235. Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Search Tree

 

Given a binary search tree (BST), find the lowest common ancestor (LCA) of two given nodes in the BST.

According to the definition of LCA on Wikipedia: “The lowest common ancestor is defined between two nodes p and q as the lowest node in T that has both p and q as descendants (where we allow a node to be a descendant of itself).”

Given binary search tree:  root = [6,2,8,0,4,7,9,null,null,3,5]

找公共节点，其实就是判断root和p，q的值大小：如果都大，则递归搜索右子树（或者外部来一个循环while），都小，则搜索左子树；一大一小，则root就是最小公共节点。

因为每次判断后进入的是一边，左或者右，所以可以用while迭代去搜索。

 

/**
 * Definition for a binary tree node.
 * struct TreeNode {
 *     int val;
 *     TreeNode *left;
 *     TreeNode *right;
 *     TreeNode(int x) : val(x), left(NULL), right(NULL) {}
 * };
 */
class Solution {
public:
    TreeNode* lowestCommonAncestor(TreeNode* root, TreeNode* p, TreeNode* q) {
        int rootVal=root->val;
        int pVal=p->val;
        int qVal=q->val;
        if(pVal>rootVal&&qVal>rootVal)
        {
            return lowestCommonAncestor(root->right,p,q);
        }
        else if(pVal<rootVal&&qVal<rootVal)
            return lowestCommonAncestor(root->left,p,q);
        else 
            return root;
    }
};