235. Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Search Tree
- Total Accepted: 80240
- Total Submissions: 214043
- Difficulty: Easy
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 v and w as the lowest node in T that has both v and w as descendants (where we allow a node to be a descendant of itself).”
_______6______ / \ ___2__ ___8__ / \ / \ 0 _4 7 9 / \ 3 5
For example, the lowest common ancestor (LCA) of nodes 2
and 8
is 6
. Another example is LCA of nodes 2
and 4
is 2
, since a node can be a descendant of itself according to the LCA definition.
/**
* Definition for a binary tree node.
* public class TreeNode {
* int val;
* TreeNode left;
* TreeNode right;
* TreeNode(int x) { val = x; }
* }
*/
public class Solution {
public TreeNode lowestCommonAncestor(TreeNode root, TreeNode p, TreeNode q) {
int r = root.val;
int x = p.val;
int y = q.val;
if(x > r && y > r)
return lowestCommonAncestor(root.right, p,q);
else if(x < r && y < r)
return lowestCommonAncestor(root.left, p,q);
else if(x < r && y > r || x > r && y < r)
return root;
else if(x == r)
return root;
else
return root;
}
}