Lab 03 Implementation of Circular Doubly Linked Lists in C language

Objectives:
• Learn to create the circular doubly linked lists.
• Implement node traversal in circular doubly linked lists.
• Implement other linked list operations such as node insertion and deletion.
• Learn to use linked lists in practical applications by solving classical Josephus Problem
Pre-Lab Reading
Circular Doubly Linked Lists
A circular doubly linked list or a circular two-way linked list is a more complex type of linked list
which contains a pointer to the next as well as the previous node in the sequence. The difference
between a doubly linked and a circular doubly linked list is same as that exists between a singly
linked list and a circular linked list. The circular doubly linked list does not contain NULL in the
previous field of the first node and the next field of the last node. Rather, the next field of the last
node stores the address of the first node of the list, i.e., START . Similarly, the previous field of the
first field stores the address of the last node. A circular doubly linked list is shown in Figure 1
below:

Figure 1: Depiction of Circular Doubly Linked List

Since a circular doubly linked list contains three parts in its structure, it calls for more space per
node and more expensive basic operations. However, a circular doubly linked list provides the ease
to manipulate the elements of the list as it maintains pointers to nodes in both the directions
(forward and backward). The main advantage of using a circular doubly linked list is that it makes
search operation twice as efficient.
Inserting a new node in the Circular Doubly Linked List
In this section, we will see how a new node is added into an already existing circular doubly linked
list. We will take two cases and then see how insertion is done in each case. Rest of the cases are
similar to that given for doubly linked lists.
• Case 1: The new node is inserted at the end.
• Case 2: The new node is inserted at the beginning.
Consider the circular doubly linked list shown in Figure 2. Suppose we want to add a new node
with data 9 as the last node of the list. Then the following changes will be done in the linked list.
• Allocate memory for the new node and initialize it’s data.
• Take a pointer ‘ptr’ and make it point to the last node.
• Set ’ptr­>next’ to point to new node.
• Make the ‘next’ of the new node point to the head.
• Make the ‘prev’ of the new node point to ptr.
• Make the ‘prev’ of the head point to the new node
Read the book for further discussion on inserting items in a Circular Doubly Linked List.
 Figure 2: Inserting a node at the end in a Circular Doubly Linked List

Deleting a Node from the End of a Circular Doubly Linked List

Figure 3: Deleting the last node from a Circular Doubly Linked List

The algorithm to delete the last node from a circular doubly linked list will be as follows.
• Take a pointer variable ptr and initialize it with head. ’ptr’ now points to the first node of
the linked list.
• Traverses through the list and make ‘ptr’ point to the last node.
• We can also access the second last node from the prev field of ptr.
• Set the next field of the second last node to contain the address of head, so that it now
becomes the (new) last node of the linked list.
• Set the prev of the head to point to the new last node.
• Free the memory of the last node and return it to the free pool.

Read the book for further discussion on deleting items from a Circular Doubly Linked List.
In Lab Tasks
For this lab you are given the following files:
1. main.c
2. Node2.h
3. DoublyLinkedList.h
4. DoublyLinkedList.c
5. EmployeeData.dat
Task01: Debugging code for errors.
• Make a new project and add these files to the project.
• Compile and run the program
• Choose to load the list from the file
Now you will observe that some of the functions do not work as intended. Figure out the problems
(by debugging the code) and correct them so that you have a correctly running implementation of
Circular Doubly Linked List. Report the errors that you have corrected.

Task 02: Implementing Node Removal and Node Insertion Tasks

Use the created circular linked list in Task 01 and add functions for
1. void deleteNodeFromStart(struct node_d ** head)
2. int deleteNodeAfter(struct node_d * head, int idx)
3. void insertNodeAtStart(struct node_d ** head)

Figure 4: Printing Memory Map of the linked list

Moreover write a function ‘void printMemMap(struct node_d * head)’ that prints out the
memory map of the linked list as shown in Figure 4.
Post Lab Task: Learn more about at the Josephus Problem from the following links and make a
Circular Doubly Linked List simulation of this problem. (Your program should print the remaining
people in each iteration).

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCsD3ZGzMgE
2. https://github.com/alextop30/Josephus-Problem

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