Question

Good evening

I’m trying to implement a single linked list by myself and I’ve run into an issue when I want to create a search method. Evidently when you want to search for a node (which will be used to insert a node at a certain place) you will have to evaluate some values to see if you reached the right spot. Considering my nodes only have a data field as a identifier, I don’t see any other way than using that. However, since the data field isn’t unique there might be multiple nodes eligible.

Consider the following list: 5, 7, 2, 8, 3, 1, 6, 5, 8, 4, 2.
When I want to add a node somewhere in the list (say: After the node with value 8) he will go trough the list and add the new node after the first occurrence of ‘8’. What should I do if I wanted to insert it after the 2nd 8?

Is this even possible with a Single Linked List?

Other than that I’d like to have some feedback on my ‘removeLast()’ method which doesn’t seem to do what I want it to do (remove the last node from the list). I am aware my code isn’t supposed to work if the list has only 1 value, I’ll look into that as soon as the general code of removing the last node works.

My code can be found here.

Edited with code:

 public class SingleLinkedList {

 public void deleteLast() {
    if (lastNode != null) {
        Node currentNode = firstNode;

        while (currentNode != null) {
            Node nextNode = currentNode.getNextNode();
            Node nextNextNode = nextNode.getNextNode();

            if (nextNextNode == null) {
                nextNextNode = null;
                lastNode = nextNode;
            }
        }
        listSize--;
    }
}

}

Answer 1

Sure it can be done – you need to keep track of the number of objects you have passed in the way, and after you have passed n objects equals to the seeked one – insert the new data:

public void addAfterNth(Object data,Object o, int n) { 
    Node curr = firstNode;
    while (curr != null) { 
        if (curr.data.equals(o)) n--;
        if (n == 0) { 
            Node newNode = new Node(data,curr.nextNode);
            curr.setNext(newNode);
            break;
        }
        curr = curr.getNextNode();
    }
}

In here you insert a new node with the data denoted in the parameter data after the nth encounter of a node with data equals to o.

Running with:

SingleLinkedList list = new SingleLinkedList();
list.addLast(5);
list.addLast(7);
list.addLast(2);
list.addLast(8);
list.addLast(3);
list.addLast(1);
list.addLast(6);
list.addLast(5);
list.addLast(8);
list.addLast(4);
list.addLast(2);
list.drawList();
list.addAfterNth(999,8, 2);
System.out.println("");
list.drawList();

yields (as expected):

5, 7, 2, 8, 3, 1, 6, 5, 8, 4, 2, 
5, 7, 2, 8, 3, 1, 6, 5, 8, 999, 4, 2,