Western Governors University (WGU) ICSC2100 C949 Data Structures and Algorithms I Practice Exam

The traversal method that visits the node before its children is known as pre-order traversal. In this approach, the process starts at the root node, then visits the node itself first, followed by recursively visiting the left subtree and then the right subtree. This means that the value of the current node is processed (often printed or stored) before the traversal moves on to explore its child nodes.

In pre-order traversal, the order is fundamentally structured as "Node-Left-Right." This characteristic makes pre-order particularly useful in scenarios where you need to create a copy of the tree or where you want to serialize the tree structure, as it captures the hierarchy of the nodes starting from the root.

Understanding pre-order traversal is essential for tasks that require a clear representation of the parent-child relationships within a tree, such as constructing expression trees or dealing with hierarchical data. This traversal method effectively ensures that every node is processed before any of its offspring, thereby preserving their organizational context within the tree.