- Difficulty: Medium
- Tags: LeetCode, Medium, Tree, Depth-First Search, String, Binary Tree, leetcode-988, O(n + l * h), O(h), DFS, Backtracking
Problem
You are given the root
of a binary tree where each node has a value in the range [0, 25]
representing the letters 'a'
to 'z'
.
Return the lexicographically smallest string that starts at a leaf of this tree and ends at the root.
As a reminder, any shorter prefix of a string is lexicographically smaller.
- For example,
"ab"
is lexicographically smaller than"aba"
.
A leaf of a node is a node that has no children.
Example 1:
Input: root = [0,1,2,3,4,3,4] Output: "dba"
Example 2:
Input: root = [25,1,3,1,3,0,2] Output: "adz"
Example 3:
Input: root = [2,2,1,null,1,0,null,0] Output: "abc"
Constraints:
- The number of nodes in the tree is in the range
[1, 8500]
. 0 <= Node.val <= 25