Counting number of nodes in a binary tree

 

Introduction

   How would you count the number of nodes in a tree? Traverse all the nodes in a tree. You can do any traversal and just start counting. But there is a concept called tail recursion which is handy and very easily readable.

If you have a tree, if you know the number of nodes in the left and number of nodes in right +1, then, what you get is total number of nodes.

Concept

   You have to do tail recursion with count(root->left) + count(root->right)+1.

After you get the count, how you will find the height of the tree ?

  log₂ count_of_nodes. But in C++, you won’t get a function to calculate log base 2. :)

There is a way,

  log₁₀ n/log ₁₀ 2 = log ₂ n

So, you just need to use the above formula to get log base 2 which yields the height of the tree.

Code

Tree* tobj;

int count(Tree* root) {

    if(root == NULL)

        return 0;

    else 

        if(root->left == NULL && root->right == NULL)

            return 1;

        else

            return count(root->left) + count(root->right) + 1;    

}

cout<<count(tobj);

• you are covering 2 base conditions here, root == NULL then 0. root->left & root->right is NULL, then only root node is there, which is 1.
• This expands to 1 for each node in the left & right.