Writing programs to solve the Programming Projects helps to solidify your under­standing o...

Writing programs to solve the Programming Projects helps to solidify your under­standing of the material and demonstrates how the chapter’s concepts are applied. (As noted in the Introduction, qualified instructors may obtain completed solutions to the Programming Projects on the publisher’s Web site.)

Start with the tree, java program (Listing 8.1) and modify it to create a binary tree from a string of letters (like A, B, and so on) entered by the user. Each letter will be displayed in its own node. Construct the tree so that all the nodes that contain letters are leaves. Parent nodes can contain some non-letter symbol like +. Make sure that every parent node has exactly two children. Don’t worry if the tree is unbalanced. Note that this will not be a search tree; there’s no quick way to find a given node. You may end up with something like this:

One way to begin is by making an array of trees. (A group of unconnected trees is called a forest.) Take each letter typed by the user and put it in a node. Take each of these nodes and put it in a tree, where it will be the root. Now put all these one-node trees in the array. Start by making a new tree with + at the root and two of the one-node trees as its children. Then keep adding one-node trees from the array to this larger tree. Don’t worry if it’s an unbalanced tree. You can actually store this intermediate tree in the array by writing over a cell whose contents have already been added to the tree.

The routines find (), insert (), and deleted, which apply only to search trees, can be deleted. Keep the displayTree () method and the traversals because they will work on any binary tree.