[Leetcode] 742. Closest Leaf in a Binary Tree

方法1

Convert binary tree to graph, use BFS to find the closest leaf.
Step1: use BFS to go through the tree and store the neighbors of each node (node.left, node.right, parent of node)
Step2: get valid nodes with node.val == k.
Step3: BFS to get the closest leaf of each node, use global variable to update distance and node.

Time complexity: O(n), Space complexity: O(n)

** the leaf and the target node may not in the same side of root, so it’s hard to use divide-and-conquer. For example, [1,2,3,4,null,null,null,5,null,6], k = 2

# use dict to store a node and its neighbor node, make the tree as a undirected graph

class Solution:
    def findClosestLeaf(self, root: TreeNode, k: int) -> int:
        if not root:
            return None
        neighbors = defaultdict(list)
        neighbors[root] = []
        queue = deque([root])
        while queue:
            node = queue.popleft()
            if node.left:
                neighbors[node].append(node.left)
                neighbors[node.left].append(node)
                queue.append(node.left)
            if node.right:
                neighbors[node].append(node.right)
                neighbors[node.right].append(node)
                queue.append(node.right)
        
        valid_nodes = []
        for node in neighbors.keys():
            if node.val == k:
                valid_nodes.append(node)
        
        length = float('inf')
        res = None
        for node in valid_nodes:
            l, leaf = self.get_leaf(node, neighbors)
            if l < length:
                res = leaf
        return res.val
    
    def get_leaf(self, root, neighbors):
        visited = {}
        queue = deque([root])
        visited[root] = 0
        while queue:
            for i in range(len(queue)):
                node = queue.popleft()
                if not node.left and not node.right:
                    return visited[node], node
                for next_node in neighbors[node]:
                    if next_node not in visited:
                        queue.append(next_node)
                        visited[next_node] = visited[node] + 1```