You can use iteration instead of recursion by adding a queue, too, if you want to avoid the possibility of a stack overflow—though this will use slightly more heap memory, and there is still a risk that you can run out of heap memory if you have a large list or if you're running on a memory-constrained system. The important part is the print_list function at the end; the other stuff is just a (mostly) self-managing queue implementation I've provided:
typedef struct node_queue NodeQueue;
struct node_queue {
NODE *n;
NodeQueue *next;
};
/*
* Add an item to the end of the queue.
*
* If the item could not be added, 0 is returned.
* Otherwise, a nonzero value is returned.
*/
int enqueue(NodeQueue **headp, NodeQueue **endp, NODE *n)
{
NodeQueue *old_end = *endp;
NodeQueue *new_end;
new_end = malloc(sizeof *new_end);
if (new_end == NULL) {
return 0;
}
new_end->n = n;
new_end->next = NULL;
if (old_end != NULL) {
old_end->next = new_end;
}
if (*headp == NULL) {
*headp = new_end;
}
*endp = new_end;
return 1;
}
/*
* Remove an item from the head of the queue,
* storing it in the object that "nret" points to.
*
* If no item is in the queue, 0 is returned.
* Otherwise, a nonzero value is returned.
*/
int dequeue(NodeQueue **headp, NodeQueue **endp, NODE **nret)
{
NodeQueue *old_head = *headp;
NodeQueue *new_head;
if (old_head == NULL) {
return 0;
}
if (nret != NULL) {
*nret = old_head->n;
}
new_head = old_head->next;
free(old_head);
if (new_head == NULL) {
*endp = NULL;
}
*headp = new_head;
return 1;
}
void print_list(NODE *start)
{
NodeQueue *head = NULL;
NodeQueue *end = NULL;
NODE *current;
current = start;
/* Iterate all `pNext` nodes, then pop each `pDown` node and repeat. */
for (;;) {
/* Add the "down" node to the node queue. */
if (current->pDown != NULL) {
if (!enqueue(&head, &end, current->pDown)) {
perror("warning: could not add node to queue");
}
}
printf("%s", current->pszNode);
/*
* Move to the "next" node.
* If there is no next node, get the first "down" node from the queue.
* If there is no "down" node, break the loop to end processing.
*/
current = current->pNext;
if (current == NULL) {
if (!dequeue(&head, &end, ¤t)) {
break;
}
}
}
}
This will iterate through all pNext items before moving to a pDown item. The following 2-D list will be printed as A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q:
A
|
B--C
|
D--E-----------F
| |
G-----H I-----J
| | | |
K--L M--N O P
|
Q
You can reverse the priority of pDown/pNext in the print_list function by swapping pNext and pDown inside it, so pNext items are added to the queue and pDown items are iterated until exhausted, which will change the order in which the items are printed to A B D C E G K F I O H M Q L J P N unless you change the structure of the list.
You can see an example using both the code above and the first sample 2-D linked list above at https://repl.it/NjyV/1, though I changed the definition of NODE to make the code using its fields a bit simpler.