Height of a tree with only one node

Question

According to Wikipedia,

The height of a tree is the length of the path from the root to the deepest node in the tree. A (rooted) tree with only one

Answer 1

Assuming you are calculating the height in a recursive manner in the node class I would do this to return the height without including height of the root (java code):

int height(){
    int leftHeight = 0;
    int rightHeight = 0;
    if(left != null)
        leftHeight =+ left.height() + 1;
    if(right != null)
        rightHeight =+ right.height() + 1;
    return Math.max(leftHeight, rightHeight);
}

if you want to include the height of the root, then I would do this:

int height(){
    int leftHeight = 0;
    int rightHeight = 0;
    if(left != null)
        leftHeight =+ left.height();
    if(right != null)
        rightHeight =+ right.height();
    return Math.max(leftHeight, rightHeight) + 1;
}