Kth Smallest Element in a BST
Total Accepted: 49142
Total Submissions: 128501
Difficulty: Medium
Given a binary search tree, write a function kthSmallest
to find the kth smallest element in it.
Note:
You may assume k is always valid, 1 ≤ k ≤ BST's total elements.
Follow up:
What if the BST is modified (insert/delete operations) often and you need to find the kth smallest frequently? How would you optimize the kthSmallest routine?
Hint:
- Try to utilize the property of a BST.
- What if you could modify the BST node's structure?
- The optimal runtime complexity is O(height of BST).
Credits:
Special thanks to @ts for adding this problem and creating all test cases.
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java code:
/**
* Definition for a binary tree node.
* public class TreeNode {
* int val;
* TreeNode left;
* TreeNode right;
* TreeNode(int x) { val = x; }
* }
*/
public class Solution {
public int kthSmallest(TreeNode root, int k) {
int count = countNode(root.left);
if(k == count + 1)
return root.val;
else if(k < count + 1)
return kthSmallest(root.left, k);
else // k > count + 1
return kthSmallest(root.right, k - count - 1);
}
// 自定义函数:计算树中结点个数
int countNode(TreeNode root) {
if(root == null) return 0;
return countNode(root.left) + countNode(root.right) + 1;
}
}