Chapter 17, Problem 13RQE

Program Plan Intro

Linked list:

Linked list is a linear and dynamic data structure which is used to organize data; it contains sequence of elements which are connected together in memory to form a chain. The every element of linked list is called as a node.

List head:

List head is a pointer used to point the first node in the linked list and it is also called as “head pointer”; if the “head pointer” points to a “NULL” value, then it is considered that the “list is empty”.

Graphical representation of linked list:

The graphical representation of a linked list is as follows:

Traversing the list:

Traversing the linked list is the process of visiting the list until reaching the last node. It is one of the operations in the list, which is used to visit each node exactly once in order to access the data stored in the list.

Steps to traversing a list:

The following steps are used to perform the traversing operation in a list.

Step 1: Move to the list head (first node).

Step 2: Retrieve the data from the head node and perform the necessary operation.

Step 3: After performing operation, move the pointer to next node and perform the operation until the end of the node.

Step 4: Perform all the above travelling nodes as a visited node.

Usage of traversing the list:

Print the elements.

• Traversing the list used to display all elements from the list.

Count the elements.

• Traversing the list used to count the number of elements available in the list.

Search the element.

• Traversing the list used to search a particular value in the list.