Using a Min-Heap to Sort Words

Question

I am learning to use heaps and as an exercise I am trying to write a program using a heap class I have created to sort words. I have read in words from a file and added them to the heap successfully. I am having some trouble figuring out how I can print out a sorted list of the words. From my understanding of how a min-heap works, if I remove from the min/root node they will always be removed in sorted order. So far I have tried out to do a simple for loop but, only half of the heap is being removed.

My Main Attempt

public static void main(String[] args) {
    Heap heap = new Heap();
    heap = read( heap ); 

    for( int i = 0; i < heap.getSize(); i++){
        heap.removeMin();
    }
    heap.printHeap();
}

This is the remove function in my Heap Class

public Node removeMin(){
    Node min = heap.get(0);
    int index = heap.size() - 1;
    Node last = heap.remove(index);
    if( index > 0 ){
        heap.set( 0, last );
        Node root = heap.get(0);
        int end = heap.size() - 1;
        index  = 0;
        boolean done = false;
        while(!done){
            if(getLCLoc(index) <= end ){
                //left exists
                Node child = getNodeAt( getLCLoc(index) );
                int childLoc = getLCLoc(index);
                if( getRCLoc(index) <= end ){
                    //right exists
                    if( getNodeAt( getRCLoc(index) ).getData().compareToIgnoreCase( child.getData() ) < 0 ){
                        child = getNodeAt( getRCLoc(index) );
                        childLoc = getRCLoc(index);
                    }
                }
                if(child.getData().compareToIgnoreCase( root.getData() ) < 0 ){
                    heap.set( index, child );
                    index = childLoc;
                }else{
                    done = true;
                }
            }else{
                //no children
                done = true;
            }
        }
        heap.set( index, root );
    }
    return min;
}

Answer 1

I would guess that remove() decreases heap size by 1. So, for each iteration of your loop, you are incrementing i by 1 and decrementing heap size by 1. I would change to a while loop that runs while heapsize >0.