LeetCode 366. Find Leaves of Binary Tree

Given a binary tree, find all leaves and then remove those leaves. Then repeat the previous steps until the tree is empty.

Example:
Given binary tree 

          1
         / \
        2   3
       / \     
      4   5    

Returns [4, 5, 3], [2], [1].

Explanation:

1. Remove the leaves [4, 5, 3] from the tree

          1
         / 
        2          

2. Remove the leaf [2] from the tree

          1          

3. Remove the leaf [1] from the tree

          []         

Returns [4, 5, 3], [2], [1].

The most straight forward way to solve this problem is to get the leaves and cut them, do this recursively. The time complexity would be N! N is the Nodes of the tree and the tree is a complete tree.

The other method is to calculate the distance from leaves to root. Reserve the same distance into a vector. This is Bottom-Up traversal of tree.

int BottonUp(TreeNode* root, vector< vector<int> >& res) {
  if(!root) return 0;
  int left = BottonUp(root->left, res);
  int right = BottonUp(root->right, res);
  int depth = max(left, right); // get the max depth either right/left
  int len = res.size();
  if(depth < res.size()) res[dep].push_back(root->val);
  else res.push_back({root->val});
  return depth + 1;
}