Written by the Fiveable Content Team • Last updated August 2025
Verified for the 2026 exam
Verified for the 2026 exam•Written by the Fiveable Content Team • Last updated August 2025
Definition
Partial traversal refers to the process of visiting only a portion of the nodes in a data structure, such as a tree or graph. It involves exploring some nodes while skipping others.
Depth-first traversal: A type of partial traversal where we explore as far as possible along each branch before backtracking.
Breadth-first traversal: Another type of partial traversal where we visit all the nodes at one level before moving on to the next level.
Pre-order traversal: A specific way of partially traversing a binary tree by visiting the current node first, then its left subtree, and finally its right subtree.