Leetcode: 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"].

Note:

Although the above answer is in lexicographical order, your answer could be in any order you want.

Use a hashmap to store the digits and corresponding strings. Similar to subsets, permutations, use recursion with iteration to find all possible results.

public class Solution {
    public ArrayList<String> letterCombinations(String digits) {
        ArrayList<String> res = new ArrayList<String>();
        if (digits == null) {
            return res;
        }
        
        HashMap<Character, String> map = new HashMap<Character, String>();
        map.put('1', "");
        map.put('2', "abc");
        map.put('3', "def");
        map.put('4', "ghi");
        map.put('5', "jkl");
        map.put('6', "mno");
        map.put('7', "pqrs");
        map.put('8', "tuv");
        map.put('9', "wxyz");
        map.put('0', " ");
        
        StringBuilder item = new StringBuilder();
        helperPhone(digits, map, res, item, 0);
        return res;
    }
    
    private void helperPhone(String digits, HashMap<Character, String> map, 
    		ArrayList<String> res, StringBuilder item, int pos) {
        if (pos == digits.length()) {
            res.add(item.toString());
            return;
        }
        
        
        String number = map.get(digits.charAt(pos));
        for (int j = 0; j < number.length(); j++) {
            item.append(number.charAt(j));
            helperPhone(digits, map, res, item, pos + 1);
            item.deleteCharAt(item.length() - 1);
        }
        
    }
}