Performing Breadth First Search recursively

Question

Let\'s say you wanted to implement a breadth-first search of a binary tree recursively. How would you go about it?

Is it possible using only the call-stack

Answer 1

The dumb way:

template
struct Node { Node* left; Node* right; T value; };

template
bool searchNodeDepth(Node* node, Node** result, int depth, P pred) {
    if (!node) return false;
    if (!depth) {
        if (pred(node->value)) {
            *result = node;
        }
        return true;
    }
    --depth;
    searchNodeDepth(node->left, result, depth, pred);
    if (!*result)
        searchNodeDepth(node->right, result, depth, pred);
    return true;
}

template
Node* searchNode(Node* node, P pred) {
    Node* result = NULL;
    int depth = 0;
    while (searchNodeDepth(node, &result, depth, pred) && !result)
        ++depth;
    return result;
}

int main()
{
    // a c   f
    //  b   e
    //    d
    Node
        a = { NULL, NULL, "A" },
        c = { NULL, NULL, "C" },
        b = { &a, &c, "B" },
        f = { NULL, NULL, "F" },
        e = { NULL, &f, "E" },
        d = { &b, &e, "D" };

    Node* found = searchNode(&d, [](char* value) -> bool {
        printf("%s\n", value);
        return !strcmp((char*)value, "F");
    });

    printf("found: %s\n", found->value);

    return 0;
}