Detect Cycle in a Directed Graph | GeeksforGeeks

Given a directed graph, check whether the graph contains a cycle or not. Your function should return true if the given graph contains at least one cycle, else return false.
Solution
Depth First Traversal can be used to detect cycle in a Graph. DFS for a connected graph produces a tree. There is a cycle in a graph only if there is a back edge present in the graph. A back edge is an edge that is from a node to itself (selfloop) or one of its ancestor in the tree produced by DFS. In the following graph, there are 3 back edges, marked with cross sign. We can observe that these 3 back edges indicate 3 cycles present in the graph.

class Graph
{
    int V;    // No. of vertices
    list<int> *adj;    // Pointer to an array containing adjacency lists
    bool isCyclicUtil(int v, bool visited[], bool *rs);  // used by isCyclic()
public:
    Graph(int V);   // Constructor
    void addEdge(int v, int w);   // to add an edge to graph
    bool isCyclic();    // returns true if there is a cycle in this graph
};
 
Graph::Graph(int V)
{
    this->V = V;
    adj = new list<int>[V];
}
 
void Graph::addEdge(int v, int w)
{
    adj[v].push_back(w); // Add w to v’s list.
}
 
// This function is a variation of DFSUytil() in http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/archives/18212
bool Graph::isCyclicUtil(int v, bool visited[], bool *recStack)
{
    if(visited[v] == false)
    {
        // Mark the current node as visited and part of recursion stack
        visited[v] = true;
        recStack[v] = true;
 
        // Recur for all the vertices adjacent to this vertex
        list<int>::iterator i;
        for(i = adj[v].begin(); i != adj[v].end(); ++i)
        {
            if ( !visited[*i] && isCyclicUtil(*i, visited, recStack) )
                return true;
            else if (recStack[*i])
                return true;
        }
 
    }
    recStack[v] = false;  // remove the vertex from recursion stack
    return false;
}
 
// Returns true if the graph contains a cycle, else false.
// This function is a variation of DFS() in http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/archives/18212
bool Graph::isCyclic()
{
    // Mark all the vertices as not visited and not part of recursion
    // stack
    bool *visited = new bool[V];
    bool *recStack = new bool[V];
    for(int i = 0; i < V; i++)
    {
        visited[i] = false;
        recStack[i] = false;
    }
 
    // Call the recursive helper function to detect cycle in different
    // DFS trees
    for(int i = 0; i < V; i++)
        if (isCyclicUtil(i, visited, recStack))
            return true;
 
    return false;
}

Time Complexity of this method is same as time complexity of DFS traversal which is O(V+E).

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