Hiccup-style structures are a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. That is, they're very succinct to write, but a giant pain to manipulate programmatically, because the semantic nesting structure is not reflected in the physical structure of the nodes. So, the first thing I would do is convert to Enlive-style tree representation (or, ideally, generate Enlive to begin with):
(def hiccup
["root"
["level_a_node3" ["leaf432"]]
["level_a_node2"
["level_b_node2"
["level_c_node1"
["leaf654"]]]
["level_b_node1"
["leaf987"]]
["leaf789"]]
["level_a_node1"
["leaf456"]]
["leaf123"]])
(defn hiccup->enlive [x]
(when (vector? x)
{:tag (first x)
:content (map hiccup->enlive (rest x))}))
(def enlive (hiccup->enlive hiccup))
;; Yielding...
{:tag "root",
:content
({:tag "level_a_node3", :content ({:tag "leaf432", :content ()})}
{:tag "level_a_node2",
:content
({:tag "level_b_node2",
:content
({:tag "level_c_node1",
:content ({:tag "leaf654", :content ()})})}
{:tag "level_b_node1", :content ({:tag "leaf987", :content ()})}
{:tag "leaf789", :content ()})}
{:tag "level_a_node1", :content ({:tag "leaf456", :content ()})}
{:tag "leaf123", :content ()})}
Having done this, the last thing getting in your way is your desire to use zippers. They are a good tool for targeted traversals, where you care a lot about the structure near the node you are working on. But if all you care about is the node and its children, it is much easier to just write a simple recursive function to traverse the tree:
(defn paths-to-leaves [{:keys [tag content] :as root}]
(when (seq content)
(if (every? #(empty? (:content %)) content)
[(list tag)]
(for [child content
path (paths-to-leaves child)]
(cons tag path)))))
The ability to write recursive traversals like this is a skill that will serve you many times throughout your Clojure career (for example, a similar question I recently answered on Code Review). It turns out that a huge number of functions on trees are just: call yourself recursively on each child, and somehow combine the results, usually in a possibly-nested for loop. The hard part is just figuring out what your base case needs to be, and the correct sequence of maps/mapcats to combine the results without introducing undesired levels of nesting.
If you insist on sticking with Hiccup, you can de-mangle it at the use site without too much pain:
(defn hiccup-paths-to-leaves [node]
(when (vector? node)
(let [tag (first node), content (next node)]
(if (and content (every? #(= 1 (count %)) content))
[(list tag)]
(for [child content
path (hiccup-paths-to-leaves child)]
(cons tag path))))))
But it's noticeably messier, and is work you'll have to repeat every time you work with a tree. Again I encourage you to use Enlive-style trees for your internal data representation.
