I have been reading about tree data structure to model a problem. I need to construct memory representation of a data which is very similar to folder/file representation in file system (I don’t imply the actual file stored in disk but the explorer like structure). The tree may be maximum 10 deep The intermediate nodes may only have moderate number of children (say 10 ), but there could be thousands of leaf nodes.[that is like thousands of files in the folder and file is the leaf node]
Some thoughts
- A Binary tree cannot work as one node can at the most have only 2
children. (say we can have 3 subfolders) - A very generic tree implementation may be inefficient as my data can be ordered. Like the left sibling is smaller/lesser than the right ones. I hope this allow to have efficient traversal.
- A B-tree sounds very close, but does it insist balancing requirements. In my case, the depth won’t be more than 10, but not necessarily all the branch that deep.(say c:/windows , C:/MyDoc../A/B/C)
Please help with your experience. Should I custom make a tree or any suitable data structure available (don’t mean specific to a programming language)
You have two different kinds of nodes: files and folders.
A folder node contains a set (or map) of children, where the children may themselves be files or folders.
Alternatively, you might prefer for a folder node to contain a set of files and a set of folders.
For the sets, just use your favorite representation of ordered sets (probably the one that comes with whatever language you are using). Depending the exact details of your situation, you might prefer to use a map instead.