LeetCode

Zigzag Iterator

Michael

Jun 3, 2023 • 1 min read

Given two 1d vectors, implement an iterator to return their elements alternately.

For example, given two 1d vectors:

v1 = [1, 2]
v2 = [3, 4, 5, 6]

By calling next repeatedly until hasNext returns false, the order of elements returned by next should be: [1, 3, 2, 4, 5, 6].

Follow up: What if you are given k 1d vectors? How well can your code be extended to such cases?

Clarification for the follow up question:
The "Zigzag" order is not clearly defined and is ambiguous for k > 2 cases. If "Zigzag" does not look right to you, replace "Zigzag" with "Cyclic". For example, given the following input:

[1,2,3]
[4,5,6,7]
[8,9]

It should return [1,4,8,2,5,9,3,6,7].

public class ZigzagIterator {
    private Queue<Iterator> queue;

    public ZigzagIterator(List<Integer> v1, List<Integer> v2) {
        queue = new LinkedList<Iterator>();
        
        if (!v1.isEmpty()) {
            queue.add(v1.iterator());
        }
        if (!v2.isEmpty()) {
            queue.add(v2.iterator());
        }
    }

    public int next() {
        Iterator iterator = queue.poll();
        int val = (int)iterator.next();
        
        if (iterator.hasNext()) {
            queue.offer(iterator);
        }
        
        return val;
    }

    public boolean hasNext() {
        return !queue.isEmpty();
    }
}

/**
 * Your ZigzagIterator object will be instantiated and called as such:
 * ZigzagIterator i = new ZigzagIterator(v1, v2);
 * while (i.hasNext()) v[f()] = i.next();
 */

Hope this helps,
Michael