Traversing a Huffman Tree

Question

So Currently I have a program that creates a huffman tree. the tree is made up of "Hnodes" with these fields: right (points to right child) left (points to left child) code (string of integers, ideally the 0's and 1's that will be the huffman code of this node) character (the character contained in the node).

I have created the huffman tree by adding nodes from a linked list - i know the tree was created correctly. As i created the tree, i told the node when i gave it a parent node, that if it was the parent's "right", its code string was 1, if left 0. However obviously after the entire tree is created, each node is only going to have either a 0 or 1, but not yet a string like 00100101. My question is, now that I have this tree, can can I traverse it? I understand the thought would be to give each child its parent's code + the child's own code, but I do not understand how to loop through the tree to accomplish this.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Maybe this?

  ExpandBinaryPaths(node, prefix)
  1. if node is null then return 
  2. else then
  3.    node.binary = prefix concat node.binary
  4.    ExpandBinaryPaths(node.left, node.binary)
  5.    ExpandBinaryPaths(node.right, node.binary)
  6.    return

The idea is you would call this on the root with no prefix... ExpandBinaryPaths(root, "").