Lecture 09

Circular Linked List

Mr. Mubashir Ali

Lecturer (Dept. of Software Engineering)
[email protected]
Lahore Garrison University, Lahore
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Previous Lecture
1. Delete to Head in Doubly Linked List
2. Delete to Tail
3. Delete to Specific Position
4. Searching
5. Traversing
6. Lab-4

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Outline
1. Circular Linked List
2. Advantages of Circular Linked List
3. Applications of Circular Linked List
4. Operations on Circular Linked List
5. Add to Head
6. Add to Tail
7. Add to Specific Position
8. Lab 5.1
9. 2nd Submission

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Circular Linked List
Circular linked list is a linked list where all nodes
are connected to form a circle. There is no NULL
at the end. A circular linked list can be a singly
circular linked list or doubly circular linked list.

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Advantages of Circular Linked List
• Any node can be a starting point. We can traverse
the whole list by starting from any point. We just
need to stop when the first visited node is visited
again.
• Useful for implementation of queue.
Unlike this implementation, we don’t need to
maintain two pointers for front and rear if we use
circular linked list. We can maintain a pointer to the
last inserted node and front can always be obtained
as next of last.
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Applications of Circular Linked List
• The real life application where the circular linked list
is used is our Personal Computers, where multiple
applications are running. All the running applications
are kept in a circular linked list and the OS gives a
fixed time slot to all for running. The Operating
System keeps on iterating over the linked list until all
the applications are completed.
• Another example can be Multiplayer games. All the
Players are kept in a Circular Linked List and the
pointer keeps on moving forward as a player's
chance ends.
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Applications of Circular Linked List
• Circular Linked List can also be used to create Circular
Queue. In a Queue we have to keep two pointers,
FRONT and REAR in memory all the time, where as in
Circular Linked List, only one pointer is required.
• Circular Doubly Linked Lists are used for
implementation of advanced data structures
like Fibonacci Heap.

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 Operations on Doubly Linked List
Operation Description
Insertion at Adding the node into the linked list at
beginning beginning.
Insertion at end Adding the node into the linked list to the
end.
Insertion after Adding the node into the linked list after the
specified node specified node.
Deletion at Removing the node from beginning of the list
beginning
Deletion at the Removing the node from end of the list.
end
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Operations on Doubly Linked List
Operation Description
Deletion of the Removing the node which is present just after
node having given the node containing the given data.
data
Searching Comparing each node data with the item to
be searched and return the location of the
item in the list if the item found else return
null.
Traversing Visiting each node of the list at least once in
order to perform some specific operation like
searching, sorting, display, etc. or as many
operations as you want.
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 Add to Head
Insertion in an empty List:
Initially when the list is empty, last pointer will be NULL.

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 Add to Head
Insertion at the beginning of the list:
To Insert a node at the beginning of the list, follow these
step:
1. Create a node, say T.
2. Make T -> next = last -> next.
3. last -> next = T.

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Add to Head

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Add to Tail
Insertion at the end of the list:
To Insert a node at the end of the list, follow these step:
1. Create a node, say T.
2. Make T -> next = last -> next;
3. last -> next = T.
4. last = T.

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Add to Tail

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Add to Specific Position
Insertion in between the nodes:
To Insert a node at the end of the list, follow these step:
1. Create a node, say T.
2. Search the node after which T need to be insert, say
that node be P.
3. Make T -> next = P -> next;
4. P -> next = T.
Suppose 12 need to be insert after node having value
10

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Add to Specific Position

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Implementation

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Implementation

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Implementation

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Implementation

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Implementation

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Implementation

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Implementation

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Implementation

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Implementation

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Lab-5.1
Write C++ program to perform dynamic
implementation of Circular Linked List(Singly
and Doubly). Write function for add data to
head, tail and specific position.

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2nd Submission
Submit “Title and Abstract & Introduction” of your
semester research project at TURNITIN within
deadline, decided in class.

Note: Submission with ambiguous topics or containing

plagiarism more than 15% will be rejected.

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Summary
 Circular Linked List
 Advantages of Circular Linked List
 Applications of Circular Linked List
 Operations on Circular Linked List
 Add to Head
 Add to Tail
 Add to Specific Position
 Lab 5.1
 2nd Submission

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References
you will be able to find course resources at
http://www.mubashirali.com/data-structures-algorithms/

Topic 3.3 (Data Structures and Algorithms in C++ by Adam

Drozdek)

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