Binary Tree - Level Order Traversal

Gorav Singal

November 19, 2020

TL;DR

Use a queue (BFS) — enqueue the root, then dequeue each node and enqueue its children. Each dequeue gives you the next node in level order. O(n) time and space.

Binary Tree - Level Order Traversal

Problem Statement

Given a Binary tree, print out nodes in level order traversal from left to right.

        50
      /    \
    80      30
  /    \      \
20     40      10

# Output
# 50 80 30 20 40 10

Approach-1

Use BFS (Breadth First Search) algorithm. Since, it reaches out to nodes first that are immediate neighbours.

Idea is to take a queue, keep accumulating queue for each child.

void bfs(Node node) {
  Queue<Node> q = new Queue();
  q.add(node);

  while (!q.isEmpty()) {    
    Node n = q.pop();
    print(n);

    if (n.left != null) q.add(n.left);
    if (n.right != null) q.add(n.right);
  }
}

The Complexity is O(n) as we are visiting each nodes only once.

Approach-2

You can prepare a list of nodes at each level. We will also use DFS (Depth First Search) algorithm here.

void levelOrder(Node node, List<List<Node>> list, int level) {
    if (node == null)
      return;
    List<Node> levelList = list.get(level);
    if (levelList == null) {
      levelList = new ArrayList();
      list.add(levelList);
    }
    levelList.add(node);

    levelOrder(node.left, list, level+1);
    levelOrder(node.right, list, level+1);
 }

List<List<Node>> list = new ArrayList();
levelOrder(root, list, 0);

After this, we can print the list.

The Complexity is O(n) as we are visiting each nodes only once.

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