How do I detect a loop in this linked list?

Posted by jjujuma on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by jjujuma
Published on 2010-04-18T17:08:53Z Indexed on 2010/04/18 17:13 UTC
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Say you have a linked list structure in Java. It's made up of Nodes:

class Node {
    Node next;
    // some user data
}

and each Node points to the next node, except for the last Node, which has null for next. Say there is a possibility that the list can contain a loop - i.e. the final Node, instead of having a null, has a reference to one of the nodes in the list which came before it.

What's the best way of writing

boolean hasLoop(Node first)

which would return true if the given Node is the first of a list with a loop, and false otherwise? How could you write so that it takes a finite amount of space and a reasonable amount of time?

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