Interview Question: Merge two sorted singly linked lists without creating new nodes

Question

This is a programming question asked during a written test for an interview. \"You have two singly linked lists that are already sorted, you have to merge them and return a

Answer 1

This could be done without creating the extra node, with just an another Node reference passing to the parameters (Node temp).

private static Node mergeTwoLists(Node nodeList1, Node nodeList2, Node temp) {
    if(nodeList1 == null) return nodeList2;
    if(nodeList2 == null) return nodeList1;

    if(nodeList1.data <= nodeList2.data){
        temp = nodeList1;
        temp.next = mergeTwoLists(nodeList1.next, nodeList2, temp);
    }
    else{
        temp = nodeList2;
        temp.next = mergeTwoLists(nodeList1, nodeList2.next, temp);
    }
    return temp;
}