Question

I have a book that explains the over all binary search tree in a very bad way i have so far been able to close study my book and get an idea of the binary search tree however i find the explanation for the Binary search tree’s operation Delete

I do understand the two first simple operations:

• Deleting a leaf (node with no children): Deleting a leaf is easy, as
  we can simply remove it from the tree.
• Deleting a node with one child: Remove the node and replace it with
  its child.

However the one with two children is really difficult for me to understand, i have already read on wiki and other sites to try and find a solution but i find the explanations to be kinda encrypted.

I was hoping that someone here could give me a more details or explain it in to me another way ?

Answer 1

When the node has two children you have to:

1. Find the minimum.
2. Replace the key of the node to be deleted by the minimum element.

look at this picture:
we want to delete element 4

• 4 has 2 children.

• find min right sub-tree.

• 5 found.

• So, 4 is replaced by 5, and 4 is deleted.

Hope that is what you are looking for!!