Help with understanding how to create this pointer

[hopesfall]

Ok so let's say I have a pointer of type TreeNode called root. This pointer points to the beginning of my binary search tree(http://imgur.com/MqVhJ) and to reach the bottom of my tree I could manually do something like this root->leftChild->rightChild->item but I know that's not ideal. So I've made a loop that looks something like this:
for(TreeNode *treeNodePtr = root; root != NULL; ){}

My question is, when I reach the desired TreeNode in my loop, how do I actually affect my tree? That is, I want to change or delete a TreeNode when my treeNodePtr points to the TreeNode that is desired by doing something like this:

// treeNodePtr points to the node in the tree which I want to alter

//exchanging the right child of this tree with its parent
treeNodePtr = treeNodePtr->rightChildPtr;

[BlackSheep]

I don't quite understand what you mean. Do you want to simply change a value stored in one of the nodes?
This is basically what you have right now.

treeNodePtr->RightChild->foo = bar;
//or
treeNodePtr->foo = bar;

To reach the bottom of the tree you could use a recursive function like this:

int Traverse(int key)
{
Node *ptr = this;
if(ptr->key == key){return ptr->value;}
else if(ptr->key < key && ptr->Left != NULL){return ptr->Left->Traverse(key);}
else if(ptr->Right != NULL) {return ptr->Right->Taverse(key);}
else{return -1;}
}

This function can obviously be changed to accept more parameters, which could help make changes to the tree.

[hopesfall]

Ok, well I have an assignment for school that asks me to implement an iterative version of deleting a node from the tree. So I'm using a loop to go through the tree until I find the node. This is where the for(TreeNode *treeNodePtr = root; root != NULL; ){} comes into play. So once treeNodePtr == the node im looking for, I want to delete that node. In my head I'm thinking I should delete the node by replacing what it currently is with its leftmost child. I do this by: treeNodePtr = treeNodePtr->leftChildPtr;

But back to my original question...When treeNodePtr points to the node wish needs to be deleted, how do I actually take it out of my tree? Altering treeNodePtr doesn't affect the tree with what I've tried.

[BlackSheep]

Oh, okay. In that case you just have to delete what's at the end of your search. So if the treeNodePtr->Right is what you want to delete you would just do this:

delete treeNodePtr->Right;
treeNodePtr->Right = NULL; //Set it back to NULL so that you know it doesn't point anywhere

//Doing this is not a good idea:
delete treeNodePtr; //since the node's parent won't know it was deleted. 

Just make sure that if Right is not actually a leaf node, and has it's own children, that these get taken care of by Right's destructor. Otherwise you will have a memory leak.
How are you identifying which node you want to delete? Does each node have a key? Hold a special value? Cover an area? Or are you simply looking for a node which doesn't point anywhere else?