How to keep track of depth in breadth first search?

Question

I have a tree as input to the breadth first search and I want to know as the algorithm progresses at which level it is?

# Breadth First Search Implementation
graph = { 
    'A':['B','C','D'],
    'B':['A'],
    'C':['A','E','F'],
    'D':['A','G','H'],
    'E':['C'],
    'F':['C'],
    'G':['D'],
    'H':['D']
    }


def breadth_first_search(graph,source):
    """
    This function is the Implementation of the breadth_first_search program
    """
    # Mark each node as not visited
    mark = {}
    for item in graph.keys():
        mark[item] = 0

    queue, output = [],[]

    # Initialize an empty queue with the source node and mark it as explored
    queue.append(source)
    mark[source] = 1
    output.append(source)

    # while queue is not empty
    while queue:
        # remove the first element of the queue and call it vertex
        vertex = queue[0]
        queue.pop(0)
        # for each edge from the vertex do the following
        for vrtx in graph[vertex]:
            # If the vertex is unexplored
            if mark[vrtx] == 0:
                queue.append(vrtx)  # mark it as explored
                mark[vrtx] = 1      # and append it to the queue
                output.append(vrtx) # fill the output vector
    return output

print breadth_first_search(graph, 'A')

It takes tree as an input graph, what I want is, that at each iteration it should print out the current level which is being processed.

Answer 1

You don't need to use extra queue or do any complicated calculation to achieve what you want to do. This idea is very simple.

This does not use any extra space other than queue used for BFS.

The idea I am going to use is to add null at the end of each level. So the number of nulls you encountered +1 is the depth you are at. (of course after termination it is just level).

     int level = 0;
     Queue <Node> queue = new LinkedList<>();
     queue.add(root);
     queue.add(null);
     while(!queue.isEmpty()){
          Node temp = queue.poll();
          if(temp == null){
              level++;
              queue.add(null);
              if(queue.peek() == null) break;// You are encountering two consecutive `nulls` means, you visited all the nodes.
              else continue;
          }
          if(temp.right != null)
              queue.add(temp.right);
          if(temp.left != null)
              queue.add(temp.left);
     }