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230. Kth Smallest Element in a BST

Medium

Given the root of a binary search tree, and an integer k, return the kth smallest value (1-indexed) of all the values of the nodes in the tree.

Example 1:

Input: root = [3,1,4,null,2], k = 1
Output: 1

Example 2:

Input: root = [5,3,6,2,4,null,null,1], k = 3
Output: 3

Constraints:

  • The number of nodes in the tree is n.
  • 1 <= k <= n <= 104
  • 0 <= Node.val <= 104

Follow up: If the BST is modified often (i.e., we can do insert and delete operations) and you need to find the kth smallest frequently, how would you optimize?

Solution

# Definition for a binary tree node.
# class TreeNode:
#     def __init__(self, val=0, left=None, right=None):
#         self.val = val
#         self.left = left
#         self.right = right


class Solution:
    def kthSmallest(self, root: Optional[TreeNode], k: int) -> int:
        def to_array(root: Optional[TreeNode]):
            if not root:
                return []

            return to_array(root.left) + [root.val] + to_array(root.right)

        return to_array(root)[k - 1]