[SOLVED] N-ary trees in C

N-ary trees in C

Which would be a neat implemenation of a N-ary tree in C language?

Particulary, I want to implement an n-ary tree, not self-ballancing, with an unbound number of children in each node, in which each node holds an already defined struct, like this for example:

struct task {
  char command[MAX_LENGTH];
  int required_time;
};

Solution

As a first pass, you could simply create a struct (let's call it TreeNode) which holds a task, as well as a set of pointers to TreeNodes. This set could either be an array (if N is fixed) or a linked list (if N is variable). The linked list would require you to declare an additional struct (let's called it ListNode) with a TreeNode pointer to the actual child (part of the tree), and a pointer to the next ListNode in the list (null if at the end of the list).

It might look something like this:

struct task {
  char command[MAX_LENGTH];
  int required_time;
};

struct TreeNode;

struct ListNode {
  struct TreeNode * child;
  struct ListNode * next;
};

struct TreeNode {
  struct task myTask;
  struct ListNode myChildList;
};