https://leetcode.com/problems/lowest-common-ancestor-of-a-binary-search-tree/
Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Search Tree
Total Accepted: 30832 Total Submissions: 81197 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.
Code
# Definition for a binary tree node.
# class TreeNode(object):
# def __init__(self, x):
# self.val = x
# self.left = None
# self.right = None
class Solution(object):
def lowestCommonAncestor(self, root, p, q):
"""
:type root: TreeNode
:type p: TreeNode
:type q: TreeNode
:rtype: TreeNode
"""
if p.val > q.val:
p, q = q, p
if p.val < root.val and q.val > root.val:
return root
if p.val == root.val or q.val == root.val:
return root
if p.val < root.val and q.val < root.val:
return self.lowestCommonAncestor(root.left, p, q)
else:
return self.lowestCommonAncestor(root.right, p, q)
Idea
Since it is already a BST, it should be easy. Please go to another post to see how to find lowest common ancestor for normal binary tree.