Made a "deep copy" function for the following class: public class Node { public String data; public List chain; } By "deep copy" he meant that each node in the chain needs to be a fresh copy, not the original nodes. That way modifying the original node will not change the copy in any way.

Question

Made a "deep copy" function for the following class:

public class Node {
     public String data;
     public List<Node> chain;
}

By "deep copy" he meant that each node in the chain needs to be a fresh copy, not the original nodes. That way modifying the original node will not change the copy in any way.

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

The key problem is that you could have a never-ending copying loop. Say you're trying to copy node A and node A is in A.chain. If you just recursively call your copy function, you'll end up recursing forever. You want to use a hash table, with the original nodes as keys that point to their new copy. That way you only end up creating a new node when you need to.

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