Flatten a Multilevel Doubly Linked List
You are given a doubly linked list which in addition to the next and previous pointers, it could have a child pointer, which may or may not point to a separate doubly linked list. These child lists may have one or more children of their own, and so on, to produce a multilevel data structure, as shown in the example below.
Flatten the list so that all the nodes appear in a single-level, doubly linked list. You are given the head of the first level of the list.
Example:
Input:
1---2---3---4---5---6--NULL
|
7---8---9---10--NULL
|
11--12--NULL
Output:
1-2-3-7-8-11-12-9-10-4-5-6-NULL
Explanation for the above example:
Given the following multilevel doubly linked list:

We should return the following flattened doubly linked list:

Solution
Solution is inspired by this article here. The idea is to change pointers so it "inserts" child into parent and parent.next.
/*
// Definition for a Node.
class Node {
public int val;
public Node prev;
public Node next;
public Node child;
public Node() {}
public Node(int _val,Node _prev,Node _next,Node _child) {
val = _val;
prev = _prev;
next = _next;
child = _child;
}
};
*/
class Solution {
public Node flatten(Node head) {
Node parent = head;
while (parent != null) {
Node child = parent.child;
if (child != null) {
Node lastChild = child;
while (lastChild.next != null) { // find last child
lastChild = lastChild.next;
}
if (parent.next != null) { // if parent has next, set child as previous of the next one
// if parent.next is null, it can't reference back
parent.next.prev = lastChild;
}
// make links (insert child into parent)
parent.child.prev = parent;
lastChild.next = parent.next;
parent.next = parent.child;
parent.child = null;
}
parent = parent.next;
}
return head;
}
}
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