428. Serialize and Deserialize N-ary Tree

Serialization is the process of converting a data structure or object into a sequence of bits so that it can be stored in a file or memory buffer, or transmitted across a network connection link to be reconstructed later in the same or another computer environment.

Design an algorithm to serialize and deserialize an N-ary tree. An N-ary tree is a rooted tree in which each node has no more than N children. There is no restriction on how your serialization/deserialization algorithm should work. You just need to ensure that an N-ary tree can be serialized to a string and this string can be deserialized to the original tree structure.

For example, you may serialize the following 3-ary tree

as [1 [3[5 6] 2 4]]. You do not necessarily need to follow this format, so please be creative and come up with different approaches yourself.

Note:

N is in the range of [1, 1000]
Do not use class member/global/static variables to store states. Your serialize and deserialize algorithms should be stateless.

方法1: recursion

思路：

和297的区别主要在于紫薯的数量不确定，所以在对children序列化之前，先保存一下children.size()。主体仍是dfs，这里采用先序遍历，由于每个节点相当于多了一个后缀的数字来标示它有多少个子节点，这样可以提前创建。注意处理nullptr的问题，一般情况下nullptr不应该被放进children，但也可能出现，如果扩张了children的size但是却没有录入相应的字符标记，而是直接返回，会造成deserialize失败。而且test case里面有根节点直接是null的情况，所以对于null还是要特殊处理一下的。这里采用“#”来标记出现了# 的情况，读到的时候也会知道后面没有size的存在。

/*
// Definition for a Node.
class Node {
public:
    int val = NULL;
    vector<Node*> children;

    Node() {}

    Node(int _val, vector<Node*> _children) {
        val = _val;
        children = _children;
    }
};
*/
class Codec {
public:

    // Encodes a tree to a single string.
    string serialize(Node* root) {
        string code = "";
        serializeHelper(root, code);
        return code;
    }

    void serializeHelper(Node* root, string & code) {
        if (!root) {
            code += "#";
            return;
        }
        code += to_string(root -> val) + " " + to_string(root -> children.size()) + " ";
        for (auto c: root -> children) serializeHelper(c, code);
        return;
    }
    // Decodes your encoded data to tree.
    Node* deserialize(string data) {
        istringstream in(data);
        return deserializeHelper(in);
    }
    
    Node* deserializeHelper(istringstream & in) {
        string tmp; 
        in >> tmp;
        if (tmp == "#") return nullptr;
        int val = stoi(tmp); 
        in >> tmp; 
        int n = stoi(tmp);
        
        Node* root = new Node(val, vector<Node*>(n));
        for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
            root -> children[i] = deserializeHelper(in);
        }
        return root;        
    }
};

// Your Codec object will be instantiated and called as such:
// Codec codec;
// codec.deserialize(codec.serialize(root));