Question

I need to delete all children of my prefix tree except the root. I’m not asking any code. I just need a method to traverse and delete all children of a tree.

Answer 1

You can use post order traversal to traverse the tree and delete the nodes as:

function deleteTree(node, tree_root) {
     if (node != null) {
         // recursively delete left sub-tree.
         deleteTree(node->left, tree_root);

         // recursively delete right sub-tree.
         deleteTree(node->right, tree_root);

         // time to delete the node..but only if it's not root.
         if( node != tree_root) {
              delete node;
         }  
     }
}

and call the above function as:

deleteTree(root,root);