How to implement a binary search tree in Python?

Question

This is what I\'ve got so far but it is not working:

class Node:
    rChild,lChild,data = None,None,None

    def __init__(self,key):
        self.rChild = N         


        

Answer 1

The accepted answer neglects to set a parent attribute for each node inserted, without which one cannot implement a successor method which finds the successor in an in-order tree walk in O(h) time, where h is the height of the tree (as opposed to the O(n) time needed for the walk).

Here is an implementation based on the pseudocode given in Cormen et al., Introduction to Algorithms, including assignment of a parent attribute and a successor method:

class Node(object):
    def __init__(self, key):
        self.key = key
        self.left = None
        self.right = None
        self.parent = None


class Tree(object):
    def __init__(self, root=None):
        self.root = root

    def insert(self, z):
        y = None
        x = self.root
        while x is not None:
            y = x
            if z.key < x.key:
                x = x.left
            else:
                x = x.right
        z.parent = y
        if y is None:
            self.root = z       # Tree was empty
        elif z.key < y.key:
            y.left = z
        else:
            y.right = z

    @staticmethod
    def minimum(x):
        while x.left is not None:
            x = x.left
        return x

    @staticmethod
    def successor(x):
        if x.right is not None:
            return Tree.minimum(x.right)
        y = x.parent
        while y is not None and x == y.right:
            x = y
            y = y.parent
        return y

Here are some tests to show that the tree behaves as expected for the example given by DTing:

import pytest

@pytest.fixture
def tree():
    t = Tree()
    t.insert(Node(3))
    t.insert(Node(1))
    t.insert(Node(7))
    t.insert(Node(5))
    return t

def test_tree_insert(tree):
    assert tree.root.key == 3
    assert tree.root.left.key == 1
    assert tree.root.right.key == 7
    assert tree.root.right.left.key == 5

def test_tree_successor(tree):
    assert Tree.successor(tree.root.left).key == 3
    assert Tree.successor(tree.root.right.left).key == 7

if __name__ == "__main__":
    pytest.main([__file__])