How to calculate a height of a tree - algorithm

Question

I am trying to learn DSA and got stuck on one problem.
How to calculate height of a tree. I mean normal tree, not any specific implementation of tree like BT or BST.
I have tried google but seems everyone is talking about Binary tree and nothing is available for normal tree.
Can anyone help me to redirect to some page or articles to calculate height of a tree.

Answer 1

Lets say a typical node in your tree is represented as Java class.
class Node{
Entry entry;
ArrayList<Node> children;
Node(Entry entry, ArrayList<Node> children){
this.entry = entry;
this.children = children;
}
ArrayList<Node> getChildren(){
return children;
}
}
Then a simple Height Function can be -
int getHeight(Node node){
if(node == null){
return 0;
}else if(node.getChildren() == null){
return 1;
} else{
int childrenMaxHeight = 0;
for(Node n : node.getChildren()){
childrenMaxHeight = Math.max(childrenMaxHeight, getHeight(n));
}
return 1 + childrenMaxHeight;
}
}
Then you just need to call this function passing the root of tree as argument. Since it traverse all the node exactly once, the run time is O(n).

Answer 2

1. If height of leaf node is considered as 0 / Or height is measured depending on number of edges in longest path from root to leaf :
int maxHeight(treeNode<int>* root){
if(root == NULL)
return -1; // -1 beacuse since a leaf node is 0 then NULL node should be -1
int h=0;
for(int i=0;i<root->childNodes.size();i++){
temp+=maxHeight(root->childNodes[i]);
if(temp>h){
h=temp;
}
}
return h+1;
}
2. If height of root node is considered 1:
int maxHeight(treeNode<int>* root){
if(root == NULL)
return 0;
int h=0;
for(int i=0;i<root->childNodes.size();i++){
temp+=maxHeight(root->childNodes[i]);
if(temp>h){
h=temp;
}
}
return h+1;
Above Code is based upon following class :
template <typename T>
class treeNode{
public:
T data;
vector<treeNode<T>*> childNodes; // vector for storing pointer to child treenode
creating Tree node
treeNode(T data){
this->data = data;
}
};

Answer 3

In case of 'normal tree' you can recursively calculate the height of tree in similar fashion to a binary tree but here you will have to consider all children at a node instead of just two.

Answer 4

To find a tree height a BFS iteration will work fine.
Edited form Wikipedia:
Breadth-First-Search(Graph, root):
create empty set S
create empty queues Q1, Q2
root.parent = NIL
height = -1
Q1.enqueue(root)
while Q1 is not empty:
height = height + 1
switch Q1 and Q2
while Q2 is not empty:
for each node n that is adjacent to current:
if n is not in S:
add n to S
n.parent = current
Q1.enqueue(n)
You can see that adding another queue allows me to know what level of the tree.
It iterates for each level, and for each mode in that level.
This is a discursion way to do it (opposite of recursive). So you don't have to worry about that too.
Run time is O(|V|+ |E|).