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”].
题意：九键输入法，有多少可能的字符串输出
代码解析：方法一：用迭代的思想，每一次把新的字符加入到已有的字符串上去再回溯到上一层
方法二耗时比较长，思想也是迭代，但是没有回溯

public class Solution3 { 
    public List letterCombinations(String digits) { 
        List result=new ArrayList(); 
        StringBuffer sb=new StringBuffer(); 
        int value=digits.length()-1; 
        if(digits.length()==0) { 
            return result; 
        } 
        letterCombinationsHelper(result,sb,0,value,digits); 
        return result;
    }
    public void letterCombinationsHelper(List<String> result,StringBuffer sb,int index,int max,String digits)
    {
        if(index>max)
        {
            result.add(new String(sb.toString()));
            return;
        }

        char c=digits.charAt(index);
        char start='a';
        char end='c';
        /* map character from phone number to alphabet*/
        switch(c)
        {
            case '2':
              start='a';
              end='c';
              break;
            case '3':
              start='d';
              end='f';
              break;  
            case '4':
              start='g';
              end='i';
              break;
            case '5':
              start='j';
              end='l';
              break;
            case '6':
              start='m';
              end='o';
              break;
            case '7':
              start='p';
              end='s';
              break;
            case '8':
              start='t';
              end='v';
              break;
            case '9':
              start='w';
              end= 'z';
              break; 



        }
        /*iterate over all the character mapping and back track*/
        for(char val=start;val<=end;val++)
        {
            sb.append(val);
            letterCombinationsHelper(result,sb,index+1,max,digits);
            sb.deleteCharAt(sb.length()-1);
        }

    }
}

方法二

public class Solution {
    public List<String> letterCombinations(String digits) {
        List<String> result = new ArrayList<String>();

        int n = digits.length();
        if(n < 1) return result;

        result.add("");

        for(int i = 0; i < n; i++)
        {
            char c = digits.charAt(i);
            if(!dict.containsKey(c)) return new ArrayList<String>();
            String s = dict.get(c);
            List<String> temp = new ArrayList<String>();
            for(String element : result)
            {
                for(char extra : s.toCharArray())
                {
                    temp.add(element + extra);
                }
            }
            result = temp;
        }
        return result;
    }
   private static Map<Character,String> dict;

    static
    {
        dict = new HashMap<Character, String>();

        dict.put('2', "abc");
        dict.put('3', "def");
        dict.put('4', "ghi");
        dict.put('5', "jkl");
        dict.put('6', "mno");
        dict.put('7', "pqrs");
        dict.put('8', "tuv");
        dict.put('9', "wxyz");
    }
}