Question

so I have a program that performs a heap sort and I have a remove element function. I do this by taking the last element all the way on the right side and then replace the n-th element with it. To maintain the sort, I then bubble the element down to its correct place in the heap. My friend doesn’t seem to think that this will work. will it?

Answer 1

Heapsort is using max-heap, each time, you need to switch the root node, which is the max one, with the nth element, then put the max element into result list from right to left.

Then, bubble the element down to its proper position, and decrease the heap’s size from n to n-1.

Then, the new root node of new heap is the max element among the remaining n-1 elements. Just recursively switch root element with the n-1th element, and again put the max element to the result list, decrease heap’s size by 1 until the heap’s size is 0